150 years ago, Charles Darwin noticed that birds and humans were both drawn to bright plumage and elaborate display. He called this interspecies esthetic appreciation a “shared taste for the beautiful.” Now, in a recent study, an interdisciplinary team of scientists built an online game exploring the mating calls of 16 different species and discovered, to their surprise, that humans and animals agree on which sounds are more attractive.

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• How the brain can learn to truly multitask
• From the archives: The Russian space mirror that flashed across Canadian skies
• The Matrix is real: birds, dragonflies and dogs see the world in slow motion
• Could the next giant particle collider unlock the mysteries of the universe?

The newly described Tylosaurus rex was a violent bus-sized Komodo dragon-like creature with serrated teeth. Dubbed the ‘T. rex of the sea,’ it would have occupied the top of the food chain in the marine ecosystem over 80 million years ago.

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• Pigeons use their livers to find their way home
• From the archives: How Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars
• Scientists discover an underground network of lakes hidden under Arctic ice
• New book explores the million year history of how we sleep — and why we’re doing it wrong today

Scientists recorded audio and video of 8 different kinds of rockfish living in the wild near British Columbia, and were surprised they could tell the species apart through their various grunts, pops and knocks, even though the fish are closely related.

PLUS:

• DNA identifies four Franklin Expedition sailors — and solves a 160-year-old mystery
• Immune cells that fight infection get a boost from food
• Radio waves let us see the unseeable: black holes, pulsars and volcanoes on Venus
• From the archives: What will the Earth look like in 2050?
• Quirks Question: If chicken and fish blood is red, why are they white meats?