Earth news stories

Let’s turn back time. Before extinction knocked dinosaurs off their pillar, before the “Great Dying” extinction wiped out 95% of all organisms—we had the Paleozoic Era.

The effort could shed light on the timing of the asteroid or comet impact that gouged the Hiawatha crater, a 31-kilometer scar hidden under the ice, sometime within the past 3 million years. Some scientists think the event was recent and the trigger for a bout of global cooling 13,000 years ago known as the “Younger Dryas.”

A 66m-year-old murder mystery has finally been solved, researchers say, revealing an enormous asteroid struck the killer blow for the dinosaurs.

Patrick Nelson did not know exactly what he was looking at, but he knew it was special.

A teaspoon of soil from the Amazon contains as many as 1,800 microscopic life forms, of which 400 are fungi.

Dr Beth Shapiro is a paleo-geneticist who uses genomics techniques to understand how species became extinct to help conservation efforts today. By extracting DNA from a frozen lake on an Alaskan island, her team uncovered the secret of how its population of woolly mammoths died out.

Image from Flickr (Wiki Commons)

Although practically all of Earth’s human population lives on dry land, our surface is 71% covered by water.

Image from PHG (Wikki Commons)

Langebaanweg ‘E’ Quarry is a palaeontological wonderland dating back 5 million years. It has yielded one of the richest and best-preserved vertebrate fossils of the Neogene (a geological era dating from 23 million to 2.5 million years ago) to be found anywhere in Africa.

The discovery of a tiny insect fossil is unearthing big questions about the global movement of animals and the connection to changes in climate and shifting continents across deep time.

Scientists have been stunned to find that some ancient crocodiles might have moved around on two feet.

The mushroom project was initially inspired by Colorado’s wildfires.

Asteroids crashing into the ocean could have helped create the ingredients for life, scientists say. By firing different materials together using a propellant gun, they found that amino acids could form when meteorites crash into the water.

Image from magic mushrooms (Wiki Commons)

Research from Curtin University has found that pre-historic climate change does not explain the extinction of megafauna in North America at the end of the last Ice Age.

Autumn was closing in fast on northern Nevada when Martin Sander took one last look around the excavation site in the Augusta Mountains 150 miles (241 kilometers) east of Reno.