I See You and Holly Coming Home, by Rebecca Ness © The artist. Courtesy Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles

The unusually cold, rainy autumns of 1917 and 1918 discouraged mallards from migrating beyond Europe, where they transmitted H1N1 to humans and worsened the influenza pandemic. Reindeer herders discovered an Ice Age bear revealed by melting permafrost, and isotopic evidence suggested that millions of mummified sacrificial ibises in Egypt were wild-caught rather than priest-farmed. Pulp-cavity closure ratios of canine teeth were found to be a reliable way to estimate the age at death of dogs found at Ust’-Polui,…