The recurrent laryngeal nerve connects the brain to the larynx. Instead of taking a direct route, it runs down into the chest, loops around the aorta and climbs back up. The path is inherited from fish, in which this nerve served gills near the heart. As necks lengthened over evolutionary time, the detour stretched too: in giraffes, it is several meters long.
In 2022, a young tagged bar-tailed godwit flew from Alaska to Tasmania in about 11 days of nonstop flight, covering 13,560 km without eating, drinking or landing. Before departure, these birds pile on huge fat reserves and shrink their digestive organs, which are useless during the journey.
To escape rivals, a dung beetle rolls its ball of dung in a straight line. At night, it holds its course using the glowing band of the Milky Way. In a planetarium, researchers showed that beetles rolled straight under a starry sky but wandered aimlessly when the galaxy was switched off. It was the first animal known to navigate this way.