Finding a mate is hard in the animal kingdom! As these strangest animal mating rituals show, it sometimes gets even more ...

The National Zoo generally is a family-friendly place, but at the Woo at the Zoo event Friday night, it was all about wild animal sexual behavior. “We like to say we’re a free zoo where animals can ...

Sexuality and gender are often at the forefront of cultural and political debate today. In his new book, The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern ...

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don't? It's one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive ...

Get ready for Valentine’s Day by learning how zoo matchmakers use science to “swipe right” for conservation. Mike Bock Male Andean bear Quito (above) has fathered two cubs at the Smithsonian’s ...

Pets and livestock have long been selected based on traits such as friendliness, diet, and ease of management. But not every animal that could be useful ever got the spotlight. In the Americas, a ...

If a Connecticut legislative committee were to get its way, breeders and facilities that do animal testing would be required to offer animals they no longer want for adoption instead of immediately ...

The white-handed gibbon comes closest to humans in the study, with a monogamy rate of 63.5%. It’s the only other top-ranked ...

This work arose and was funded, in part, from a CIB Fellowship awarded to Benjamin Allen by the inter-institutional Centre for Invasion Biology (CIB) Centre of Excellence in South Africa, co-funded ...

Humans are far more monogamous than our primate cousins, but less so than beavers, a new study suggests. Researchers from the University of Cambridge in England analyzed the proportion of full ...

In the animal kingdom, penises can be spiked, split, corkscrewed—even detachable. They're one of the most diverse structures in biology. The human penis is so uniform, it's an anatomical outlier.

Animal breeding has traditionally focused on improving mean trait performance; however, contemporary research increasingly highlights the significance of genetic variation not only in trait means but ...