Tiny pupfish have adapted their respiration to go without oxygen for long stretches.

The desert pupfish has evolved to go without oxygen for considerable periods of time to survive its harsh environment

And you thought you could hold your breath for a long time. Enter the desert pupfish, a tiny fish that has been playing evolutionary catch-up due to the extreme changes in its environment over the last 10,000 years.

Seeded with a $2.5 million grant from the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development and matching funds from UNLV, the institute will decode people’s genomes to predict individual susceptibility to disease, study treatment options and fine-tune drug dosages to minimize adverse effects, Executive Director Martin Schiller said.

It’s that stuffy, sneezy, can’t sleep, achy time of year again. A warm burst of springlike weather in January and February launched the pollen season in earnest.

The relict leopard frog’s journey into Southern Nevada’s landscape has seen its share of challenges.

A shrewlike creature in Madagascar that can hibernate for at least nine months of the year without waking may help reveal how mammals survived the cataclysm that ended the age of dinosaurs, researchers suggest.

Even in places as seemly well-studied as the national parks of North America, new species are still being discovered. Using ultraviolet light that cause scorpions to fluoresce a ghostly glow, researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) have discovered an intriguing new scorpion in Death Valley National Park. They named the species Wernerius inyoensis, after the Inyo Mountains where it was found. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.