Innehållsförteckning för May 2025 från National Geographic Magazine

ROUGHLY 600 MILES off the coast of mainland Ecuador, conservation biologist Dee Boersma cruised in an inflatable Zodiac through the blue waters surrounding Bartolomé Island, a small part of the Pacific Ocean archipelago known as the Galápagos Islands. She was joined by several other scientists, all of whom scanned the shoreline for an elusive black-and-white seabird. Standing about a foot and a half tall, Galápagos penguins are the rarest and among the smallest penguins in the world. But most notably, they are the only ones living at the Equator, existing on these volcanic islands in the blazing hot sun. “How could you not fall in love with these birds?” asked the 78-year-old director of the University of Washington’s Center for Ecosystem Sentinels and a National Geographic Explorer. “They’re comical, they’re…

LAST YEAR, PARKS STEPHENSON stood next to the Titanic and walked slowly around it, gazing up at the massive ship. He paused to look inside one of the boiler rooms and at the position of the controls on the engines. He noticed the number 401, the ship’s ID, etched on the propeller blades. Rusticles hung from the steel shell. Twisted metal and personal trinkets from those long dead littered the ground. Stephenson, a retired naval officer and Titanic historian, wasn’t 12,500 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic, of course. He was in London, inspecting the ship’s digital twin: a one-for-one computer model made possible by advances in remote 3D scanning and mapping technology. The model is so densely detailed, a video rendering of it can be projected to…

THE AMERICAN burying beetle is much like an underground undertaker. Typically feasting on small rodents and birds, North America’s largest carrion-eating beetles usually work in pairs to sniff out a carcass, remove its fur or feathers, tunnel under it to draw it into the dirt, and coat it in oral and anal secretions, preserving the meal for later. In January scientists reported something else surprising about the nocturnal insects, which have received protections under the Endangered Species Act since 1989: They’re strangely resistant to insecticides called neonicotinoids. Despite appearing near death after exposure, many bounce back within 24 hours, suggesting a remarkable ability to detox. The team of researchers suspects that exposure to bacteria and fungi of decaying animals keeps the beetles hardy. They’re now studying the beetles and their…

JACK CARMODY HAS BUILT a sizable YouTube following by showing his viewers what it takes to run a cattle station in the Australian outback—the rugged work of mending troughs, reinforcing fences, and shooting trespassers. Feral horses and donkeys, that is, and one particularly destructive invasive species: camels. Introduced in the 19th century to help colonists survey the country’s vast interior, the creatures are now wreaking havoc across the outback and decimating the Carmody family’s ranch property, or what Australians call a cattle station. At more than 1,500 square miles, the property—Prenti Downs—is the size of Rhode Island, so there’s plenty of work to be done, and in this modern internet age, there’s plenty of content to be created. On Carmody’s channel, Jack Out The Back, no videos are more popular…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORERS These contributors have received funding from the National Geographic Society, which is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world. Learn more about the Society’s support of Explorers at natgeo.com/impact. Emin Özmen, p.62 An Explorer since 2019, photojournalist Özmen has traveled the world on assignment. For this month’s feature on the ancient Hittite Empire, he returned to the area of his Turkish hometown, Sivas. His work has also appeared in Time, the New York Times, and Le Monde. Bertie Gregory, p.16 The Bristol, U.K.–based photographer and filmmaker became an Explorer in 2015. Serving as the lead storyteller on National Geographic’s Secrets of the Penguins series, featured in this issue, he went colony-hopping in Antarctica, Namibia, South Africa, Ecuador, Argentina, and South Georgia island. Amy Toensing, p.92…

FROM SKY TO SEA Around 60 million years ago, pre-historic flying birds evolved into today’s remarkable penguins. The seabirds’ anatomy adapted to support an amazing dexterity for swimming so they could flourish in the ocean. THERMAL GRIT Some penguin species prosper in cold climates, while others do well in warmer environments. It all comes down to special adaptations by habitat that help penguins maintain their optimal internal body temperature. BREEDING MASTERY When it’s time to settle down, these birds have interesting ways to signal their interest in courtship. And once they nest and raise young, they have useful traits to care for them. All these features help secure a future for the species.…

AT ITS HEIGHT, the ancient city of Hattuşa, capital of the Hittite civilization, must have been awe-inspiring. Built into a steep hillside in what is today central Türkiye, the city was ringed by tall brick walls. It was home to as many as 7,000 people, vast temple complexes, and an imposing stone rampart visible from miles away. Today the hillside is home to a mystery. No pillars or high walls mark the ruins of the palace and temples that once stood—just stone foundations half-covered by dry grass. Some of the city’s gates still stand, guarded by statues of lions, sphinxes, and an axe-wielding god. But much is gone. The mud-brick walls have crumbled over the centuries; floods and snowmelt have eroded the original hillside, sending buildings full of clay tablets cascading…

THE RAIN CAME DOWN in sheets, roiling the surface of Fourth Lake, an oblong crescent in the heart of New York’s Adirondack Mountains and the largest of eight lakes in the Fulton chain. I laid my paddle on my knees and looked around. Our small flotilla of canoes and kayaks, containing a dozen or so paddlers, was spread out over a half mile, though the downpour obscured many of my companions. We were hustling toward the closest takeout, a mile away on Fifth Lake. Only a few hours earlier, I had shoved off from the tiny hamlet of Old Forge, in upstate New York, pushing east with a group of Native American paddlers along a portion of an ancient route that runs for 740 miles to Maine. The Northern Forest…

OH MY GOD, this thing’s going to die.” That was the thought running through the mind of wildlife filmmaker Bertie Gregory when he saw the first juvenile emperor penguin jump off a 50-foot cliff. The bird plummeted downward, splashing into the frigid Southern Ocean. After a few suspenseful seconds, it bobbed to the surface and then swam off toward the horizon. The National Geographic Explorer couldn’t believe it. What came next was even more shocking: More penguins from the crowd of several hundred huddled at the edge of the towering ice shelf plunged one by one into the sea. “There was a moment when it was just raining penguins off this cliff,” says Gregory, who captured rare footage of the event with a drone camera in Antarctica’s Atka Bay last…

Present-day sloths Three sloth families 1. Megatherioids Today’s three-toed sloths diverged from their larger, more active cousins 22 million years ago, slowly evolving to seek shelter in the rainforest canopy. 2. Mylodontoids Two-toed sloths also split from their ancient ground-browsing relatives to climb high, some 34 million years ago. 3. Megalocnoids Island sloths split from other sloths around 34 million years ago as well. Rising oceans marooned them in the Caribbean; they went extinct, with no descendants. Climbing to safety Sloths once roamed throughout the Americas. New evidence shows that humans arrived when glaciers retreated 25,000 years ago. The stress of changing habitats and hunting by humans drove sloths on the ground to extinction. Prehistoric range Present-day range Mainland ground sloths thrived in South America until 10,000 years ago. Caribbean…

ONE SCORCHING DAY last September, Annie Méchin crouched over a slab of red clay on a remote patch of farmland near Marseille, on France’s Mediterranean coast. Méchin was scraping away at the clay when she unearthed what looked like a tiny bone fragment. Sensing the familiar jolt of adrenaline that surged anytime she came across a fossil, she called out to her husband, Patrick, who was digging nearby. Carefully, the two amateur paleontologists, both retired and in their 60s, cleared the surface area, dug a small trench around the bone, and fashioned a plaster mold for the scientific record. By the time night fell, the Méchins had two more molds and a growing sense of excitement that they might be onto something big. It was “a consecration of the work…

THIRTY YEARS after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the shock of that terrorist attack is difficult to describe—as is the drama that it set off. The new three-part National Geographic series One Day in Oklahoma City tells the story of that pivotal day—April 19, 1995—by relying on the voices of those who lived through it. At 9:02 a.m., the rhythm of an ordinary morning was broken by the blast of a truck bomb near a building packed with government workers and their children at day care. A third of the structure was reduced to rubble. Rescuers raced to save survivors, until reports of a second explosion forced their evacuation, leaving some people trapped inside. Soon a nation-wide manhunt was under way. The FBI would eventually conduct more…