In 1971, researchers moved 10 wall lizards onto a small Croatian island — 36 years later, their descendants had stronger bites and a plant-heavy diet, with valves in their intestines that the scientists could not find in the population on their original island.
In 1879, Edwin Hall discovered an electrical effect thought to need a perpendicular magnetic field; 147 years later, scientists have shown it can work with the field in-plane
In 1990, the northern spotted owl became a symbol of America’s logging wars; 36 years later, scientists say it is already functionally extinct across large swaths of its range
Apollo 15 astronauts collected tiny green glass beads from the Moon in 1971; more than 35 years later scientists found evidence of water inside, changing what we knew about the lunar interior
In 1908, something exploded in the sky over Siberia with hundreds of times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, flattening more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest. When scientists finally reached the site years later, they found no crater at all