01 A claw in the drawer. More than a century ago an amateur collector, Reginald Hooley, picked up a fossil at the foot of a cliff on the Isle of Wight. In 1924 it went to London’s Natural History Museum, and into a drawer. A century and a CT scan later, it turns out to be a new species: a megaraptoran, a 3-to-4-metre hunter of the big-clawed kind, about 120 million years old. Its name, Invictibellatrix amberina, means roughly unconquered female warrior. Patience pays.
02 Pumpkin rush. In Opperdoes, West-Friesland, the Bos family grows more than a hundred kinds of pumpkin. After the autumn break, says owner Rosan Bos, customers switch from soup to Halloween. Grandfather Kees has a quality inspector: grandson Lars, eight, who decides which ones are ripe. For scale: on 10 October a pumpkin in Rhode Island set a world record at 1,431.5 kilos.
03 Guest on camera. At a survey weekend in KempenBroek, on the Dutch-Belgian border, volunteers with ARK Rewilding, Natuurpunt and Limburgs Landschap went looking for small mammals. They found a rare all-black water shrew and a shrew species never before recorded in the area. Then a wildlife camera caught something larger: a wallaby. Where it came from, nobody knows yet. Australia seems unlikely.