A remarkable new study suggests pigeons may navigate using their liver — solving a decades-long mystery about how birds find their way home across hundreds of miles by pointing to an organ no one had been looking at (opens in new tab)

A study published today in Science proposes that homing pigeons may sense the Earth’s magnetic field using iron-loaded immune cells in their livers. The paper, by a team led by cell biologist Clivia Lisowski at the University of Bonn with senior authors Christian Kurts (Bonn) and Martin Wikelski (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in […]