Islands are hotspots for biodiversity – they cover less than 7% of the Earth’s land area, but account for up to 20% of all terrestrial species on the planet. However, islands are also hotspots for species extinction as 50% of today’s IUCN threatened species are native to islands.
In a newly published paper in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, University of Illinois Chicago’s Roy Plotnick and colleagues report that fossils long-interpreted as jellyfish were anemones. To do so, they simply turned the ancient animals upside down.
Cartilaginous fish have changed much more in the course of their evolutionary history than previously believed. Evidence for this thesis has been provided by new fossils of a ray-like shark, Protospinax annectans, which demonstrate that sharks were already highly evolved in the Late Jurassic. This is the result of a recent study by an international research group led by palaeobiologist Patrick L. Jambura from the Department of Palaeontology at the University of Vienna, which was recently published in the journal Diversity.
Ancient climates can help us understand the past, but also the future. 23 million years ago, in a time called the Miocene Epoch, Connecticut was around five to six degrees warmer than today and located roughly where Long Island is now.
Dinosaur claws had many functions, but now a team from the University of Bristol and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing has shown some predatory dinosaurs used their claws for digging or even for display.
By exploring the stability and collapse of marine ecosystems during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, researchers gain insights into modern biodiversity crisis
It is called Radiocarbon 3.0: it is the newest method developments in radiocarbon dating, and promises to reveal valuable new insights about key events in the earliest human history, starting with the interaction between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe.
Plants can move in ways that might surprise you. Some of them even show “sleep movements,” folding or raising their leaves each night before opening them again the next day.
Today, species richness peaks in equatorial regions but until now there has been no clear explanation for this.
A review article published today in Nature addresses this conflict between models and evidence, known as the Holocene global temperature conundrum. Lead author Darrell Kaufman, a Regents’ professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability, and University of Arizona postdoctoral researcher Ellie Broadman, a co-author who worked on this study while earning her Ph.D. at NAU, analyzed a broad swath of available data from the last 12,000 years to break down the conundrum.
Aetosaurs had a small head and a crocodile-like body. The land dwellers were up to six meters long and widely distributed geographically. They died out about 204 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic.
Along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, according to new research led by scientists with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Queens College, CUNY, as well as the National Museums of Kenya, Liverpool John Moores University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Geologists are interested in the sedimentary cycle – erosion from mountains that forms sand that is carried out to the ocean – because it’s foundational for understanding how the planet works.
Ongoing climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions is often discussed in terms of global average warming. For example, the landmark Paris Agreement seeks to limit global warming to 1.5 ⁰C, relative to pre-industrial levels. However, the extent of future warming will not be the same throughout the planet. One of the clearest regional differences in climate change is the faster warming over land than sea. This “terrestrial amplification” of future warming has real-world implications for understanding and dealing with climate change.
Caribou have been using the same Arctic calving grounds for more than 3,000 years, according to a new study by the University of Cincinnati.
Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East.
Scientists discovered the first-ever Dickinsonia fossil in India two years ago, changing our understanding of how the continent came to be. Now, new research shows the "fossil" was just a beehive all along, changing our understanding for a second time, and the original scientists now support the new findings.
Attempts to discredit human-caused climate change by touting graphs of prehistoric atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature changes are not something new. Peter Clack has once again tried to make a point that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are comparatively low compared to past eras. But just because we're in an advantageous era compared to past eras, it does not negate the cause for alarm concerning our current warming trend.
Two sister species of near-primate, called “primatomorphans,” dating back about 52 million years have been identified by researchers at the University of Kansas as the oldest to have dwelled north of the Arctic Circle.
An unusual new species of pterosaur has been identified, which had over 400 teeth that looked like the prongs of a nit comb.
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