You say possum. I say opossum. And I’m right, so I’m calling the whole thing off. But not so fast. The possum-vs.-opossum quandary recently came up while I was editing a Beacon story about a ...

In “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death,” Susana Monsó, a professor of philosophy at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, argues that although humans are unique in our ...

It's an emergency room, but there are no bleached white sheets or injured people fighting for their lives. Instead, tiny beds are equipped with cavelike boxes and patients prefer to play dead. It is a ...

When you live with the best guard dog in North America it is not unusual to be awakened by the sharp barks that signify something is moving outdoors. Usually Maggie will go out, save the world from ...

A few days ago, I was walking along Fernwood Road in Bethesda, in a neighborhood full of office buildings and parking lots. It was not a setting where you'd expect to see animals, except as hood ...

Pity the opossum. It is such a timid creature that confrontation literally stresses it into a comatose state, such that the opossum seems to be dead. It even takes on a stink that leads many a ...

No one knows this better than the employees and volunteers at the Greenville Humane Society in South Carolina. Being at the ...