Crystal-Hoarding Chimps, Blood Moons, and Twisted-Jaw Fossils: A Season of Revelations in Science and Nature

The first months of 2026 have delivered a remarkable series of discoveries that collectively illuminate some of the deepest questions in science: Why are we drawn to beauty? What strange forms did life take hundreds of millions of years ago? And what can a blood-red moon still teach a species that has walked on its surface?

From a groundbreaking behavioral study showing that chimpanzees share humanity's fascination with crystals, to the unearthing of a 275-million-year-old creature with a jaw so bizarre it defies easy classification, to a total lunar eclipse that painted the sky crimson over half the globe — this has been a season that reminds us how much remains to be discovered.

The Blood Moon: A Celestial Farewell Until 2028

On the night of March 2-3, 2026, observers across North America, eastern Asia, Australia, and the Pacific witnessed the first total lunar eclipse visible from the Western Hemisphere since 2022. The Full Worm Moon slipped into Earth's shadow over the course of more than five hours, with totality — the phase when the Moon turns a deep, rusty red — lasting approximately 58 minutes, from 11:04 to 12:03 UTC [1][2].

The "blood moon" effect, caused by sunlight being refracted through Earth's atmosphere and bending around the planet's edge to reach the lunar surface, bathed the Moon in the combined light of every sunrise and sunset on Earth simultaneously. Photographers worldwide captured extraordinary images. In Tucson, Arizona, photographer John Ashley documented the eclipse in two-minute intervals as the reddened Moon passed behind the 90-foot bell tower of Santa Cruz Catholic Church [3]. In northern New Zealand, Phil Walker captured the full Moon deep in totality, its surface glowing with that characteristic copper hue [4].

For viewers in eastern North America, totality arrived close to sunrise — between 6:04 and 7:02 a.m. EST — creating the dramatic sight of a blood-red Moon hanging low on the western horizon as dawn broke in the east. Observers farther west saw the eclipse higher in the pre-dawn sky, with Pacific time zone viewers watching totality from 3:04 to 4:02 a.m. [5].

Unlike solar eclipses, which require protective eyewear and occur along narrow paths, total lunar eclipses are safe to view with the naked eye and visible from anywhere the Moon is above the horizon. This accessibility made the March event a truly global spectacle.

This was the last total lunar eclipse visible from North America until New Year's Eve 2028 — nearly three years away [3]. For eclipse chasers and casual observers alike, the March blood moon was a reminder of how these cosmic alignments, predictable yet still awe-inspiring, punctuate the human experience across millennia.

Our Love of Crystals Goes Back Six Million Years

Perhaps the most surprising discovery of the season came not from a distant galaxy or deep ocean trench, but from a research facility where chimpanzees were presented with a simple choice: ordinary pebbles or crystals.

A study published in Frontiers in Psychology, led by Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, an Ikerbasque Research Professor of crystallography at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián, Spain, found that chimpanzees display a powerful, innate attraction to crystals — and that this attraction appears to be driven by the same properties that have captivated humans for hundreds of thousands of years [6][7].

In carefully designed experiments, researchers presented chimpanzees with piles of 20 rounded pebbles mixed with quartz crystals. The chimps identified and selected the crystals within seconds, sorting them out with striking efficiency. When pyrite and calcite crystals were added to the mix, the chimpanzees still reliably picked out the crystal-type stones from the ordinary rocks [8].

But it was what the chimps did with the crystals that truly caught researchers' attention. "The chimpanzees began to study the crystals' transparency with extreme curiosity, holding them up to eye level and looking through them," the researchers reported [6]. The apes carried the crystals in their mouths, turned them in the light, and examined them for extended periods — behavior that researchers described as reminiscent of "old-timey prospectors" [9].

The study identified two key properties driving the chimpanzees' attraction: transparency and geometric shape. The chimps appeared to recognize and prefer stones that allowed light to pass through them and that exhibited the regular, symmetrical forms characteristic of crystalline structures [7].

An Ancient Impulse

The implications reach far beyond primate behavior. Crystals have been found repeatedly at archaeological sites alongside hominin remains, and the evidence suggests that our ancestors were collecting these stones long before they had any practical use for them.

At the Zhoukoudian site in China, twenty quartz crystals were recovered alongside Homo erectus remains dated to at least 600,000 years ago — and possibly over 800,000 years ago. At the Singi Talav site in India, six nearly complete quartz prisms were found in strata from the Lower Acheulian period, between 300,000 and 150,000 years old. In 2021, researchers reported the discovery of non-utilitarian calcite crystals collected by Homo sapiens 105,000 years ago at a rock shelter at Ga-Mohana Hill, at the edge of the Kalahari Desert [10][11].

None of these crystals show signs of having been used as tools, worked into shapes, or perforated for use as ornaments. They appear to have been valued for what they were — objects of aesthetic interest, collected and transported from their place of discovery back to shelters.

Because chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor that lived roughly six million years ago, the new study suggests that this aesthetic response to crystals may be extraordinarily ancient — a trait inherited from deep in our evolutionary past rather than a uniquely human cultural invention [8].

"This behavior, registered as far back as 780,000 years ago, has been interpreted as early evidence of symbolic thought," the researchers noted. But the chimpanzee experiments suggest the impulse may be even more fundamental than symbolic reasoning — rooted in a basic perceptual response to transparency, symmetry, and light [10].

A 275-Million-Year-Old Creature With a Twisted Jaw

While the crystal study illuminated the deep roots of an aesthetic impulse, another discovery published this season reached even further back in time — to an era 275 million years ago, when life on Earth looked profoundly different from anything alive today.

A team led by Jason Pardo, working as part of his postdoctoral fellowship at the Field Museum in Chicago, described Tanyka amnicola — a newly identified species of aquatic creature whose jaw is unlike anything previously documented in the fossil record [12][13].

The name tells part of the story: Tanyka comes from the Guaraní Indigenous language, meaning "jaw," while amnicola means "living by the river." The creature's lower jaw was twisted so that instead of facing upward, its teeth pointed out to the sides. The surface of the jawbone was covered in a series of smaller teeth called denticles, forming a grinding surface that researchers compared to a cheese grater [14].

"Nine jaws from this animal have been recovered, and they all have this twist, including the really well-preserved ones, so it's not a deformation — it's just the way the animal was made," the researchers confirmed [12].

A Plant-Eater Among Carnivores

Tanyka would have resembled something like a salamander with a slightly longer snout, and researchers estimate it may have grown up to three feet long. But its diet made it truly exceptional. Based on its grinding tooth surfaces, scientists believe Tanyka was an herbivore — or at least ate plants some of the time. This is remarkable because the vast majority of stem tetrapods, the ancient lineage to which Tanyka belongs, were strictly carnivorous [14][15].

Stem tetrapods represent the oldest lineage of four-limbed vertebrates. They eventually diverged into two great branches: one that laid eggs outside of water (leading to today's reptiles, birds, and mammals) and one whose eggs needed to remain moist (the ancestors of modern amphibians like frogs and salamanders). Tanyka belongs to neither of these crown groups — it is a representative of the ancient stem, the common trunk from which both branches grew [15].

Already a Living Fossil 275 Million Years Ago

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Tanyka is that it was already an evolutionary relic when it was alive. By 275 million years ago, during the Permian period and well before the dinosaurs appeared, more advanced tetrapod groups had long since diversified. Tanyka persisted as an archaic holdover — a "living fossil" in its own era, much like the coelacanth or horseshoe crab today [12].

The fossils were recovered from a dry riverbed in dense forest near the Amazon in Brazil. The region was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana, which included much of modern South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. Compared with fossil sites in the Northern Hemisphere, very few animals from this time period have been discovered in Gondwana, making Tanyka an important piece of a largely incomplete puzzle [15].

Ken Angielczyk, a curator of paleomammalogy at the Field Museum and co-author of the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, emphasized that the discovery helps fill significant gaps in the paleontological record of the Southern Hemisphere during a pivotal era in vertebrate evolution [13].

A Broader Moment for Discovery

These three stories — a cosmic spectacle, a window into primate cognition, and a paleontological puzzle — are part of a broader wave of scientific revelations in early 2026.

Researchers have uncovered stronger evidence that neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts don't behave as perfect mirror images, a finding with profound implications for understanding why the universe contains matter at all. A lost cache of 250-million-year-old fossils from Australia has rewritten part of the story of life after Earth's worst mass extinction. A massive global study has shown that species turnover has slowed by about one-third since the 1970s, even as climate warming continues — a finding that complicates simple narratives about biodiversity loss [16].

In animal behavior research, scientists have documented ant queens that take over rival colonies by manipulating workers into killing their own queen, bumblebee catfish that climb waterfalls in Brazil, and young capuchin monkeys that kidnap howler monkey infants — each observation expanding our understanding of the strategic complexity of animal life [17].

What Connects These Discoveries

At first glance, a blood moon, crystal-obsessed chimpanzees, and a Permian-era creature with a twisted jaw seem to share little in common. But together, they illustrate a theme that runs through the best science: the natural world is stranger, older, and more interconnected than our everyday intuitions suggest.

The lunar eclipse reminds us that we live on a planet whose shadow still reaches us in spectacular fashion — a cosmic geometry that has awed every human culture. The chimpanzee crystal study suggests that our sense of beauty may not be a cultural luxury but an inheritance from ancestors who diverged from us millions of years before the first stone tool was chipped. And Tanyka amnicola tells us that even 275 million years ago, evolution was producing creatures so eccentric, so stubbornly archaic, that they were already fossils among their contemporaries.

Each discovery, in its own way, collapses the distance between us and the deep past. The chimps holding quartz crystals up to the light are performing a gesture that connects them to Homo erectus at Zhoukoudian, to Kalahari hunter-gatherers 105,000 years ago, and to the mineral collections on display in every natural history museum today. The twisted jaw of Tanyka connects the forests of modern Brazil to a vanished world where the continents were fused and the age of dinosaurs had not yet begun.

And the blood moon — visible to anyone willing to step outside and look up — connects all of us to the simple, ancient act of watching the sky and wondering what it means.

Science, at its best, is an organized form of that wondering. This season, it has delivered answers that are as beautiful as they are strange.