Earth news stories

They might be tiny creatures with a comical appearance, but tardigrades are one of life’s great survivors. Now scientists say they have found a new species boasting an unexpected piece of armour: a protective fluorescent shield.

The islands of the Caribbean used to be home to a huge array of unusual animals, including a group of rodents that weighed up to 200 kilograms.

In today’s human-dominated world, rampant deforestation is driving many of Southeast Asia’s species towards extinction. But according to research published in the journal Nature, the opposite once occurred – as rainforests replaced grasslands thousands of years ago, megafauna and ancient humans vanished.

Early people were rapidly adapting to climate change as they made their way towards Australia tens of thousands of years ago, new research shows.

Research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found fossil evidence for manatees along the Texas coast dating back to the most recent ice age. The discovery raises questions about whether manatees have been making the visit for thousands of years, or if an ancient population of ice age manatees once called Texas home somewhere between 11,000 and 240,000 years ago.

Two in five of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction as a result of the destruction of the natural world, according to an international report. Plants and fungi underpin life on Earth, but the scientists said they were now in a race against time to find and identify species before they were lost.

A form of symbiosis, mutualism is an interaction between two individuals that benefits both—and it’s widespread across the animal kingdom.

Image from Alvesgaspar (Wiki Commons)

Sometime between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended, the Sahara Desert transformed.

Billions of years ago, long before oxygen was readily available, the notorious poison arsenic could have been the compound that breathed new life into our planet.

A University of Central Florida researcher is co-author of a new paper that may help answer why some animals have a magnetic ‘sixth’ sense, such as sea turtles’ ability to return to the beach where they were born.

The temperature of the planet during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), has been ‘nailed down’ thanks to ancient plankton fossils.

Geologists say they have discovered a large meteorite crater in outback Western Australia, which could be up to five times bigger than the famous Wolfe Creek Crater in the state’s remote north.

Researchers discover Fossil evidence of ‘hibernation-like’ state in tusks of 250-million-year-old Antarctic animal.

For decades, researchers have been uncovering archaeological treasures that disprove any suggestion that complex civilizations did not exist in the Brazilian Amazon before colonialism.

A University of Arizona-led team has nailed down the temperature of the last ice age—the Last Glacial Maximum of 20,000 years ago—to about 46 degrees Fahrenheit (7.8 C).