Earth news stories

Indigenous stories from the end of the last Ice Age could be more than myth.

At the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago, Earth was devastated by a mass extinction that exterminated more than 90% of species on the planet. Compared with other mass extinctions, recovery from the “Great Dying” was slow: It took at least 10 million years for the planet to be repopulated and restore its diversity.

More than a mile beneath the Pacific Ocean, is a seascape of oddly shaped corals and a glass sponge named after ET.

Easter Island’s towering stone heads and other archaeological elements have been charred by a fire, according to local Indigenous and Chilean authorities.

Image from: kallerna (Wiki Commons)

As we’re a species with ever-shrinking attention spans, it can be difficult to comprehend just how long life has been around on Earth. However, try to get your head around this one: Scientists have dug up fragments of DNA dating back 1 million years ago.

After more than a century of debate, researchers have settled the mystery of a tiny, enigmatic reptile that left an impression on Scottish sandstone nearly a quarter of a billion years ago.

The dinosaur-killing asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago also triggered a jumbo-size tsunami with mile-high waves in the Gulf of Mexico whose waters traveled halfway around the world, a new study finds.

The moon could have formed immediately after a cataclysmic impact that tore off a chunk of Earth and hurled it into space, a new study has suggested.

Compounds in these medicinal fungi may be natural “smart drugs.”

A team of researchers from Université Clermont Auvergne, working with a colleague from Universität Bayreuth, has found evidence that suggests the Earth’s composition changed over time during its early years via collisional erosion.

Road excavations in China’s Guizhou Province have unearthed a trove of ancient fish fossils. As a part of rock layers known as the Rongxi Formation, the newfossil bed is filled with never-before-seen species that push back the dates of our first jawed animal ancestors by about 15 million years.

South Australia’s Naracoorte Caves is one of the world’s best fossil sites, containing a record spanning more than half a million years. Among the remains preserved in layers of sand are the bones of many iconic Australian megafauna species that became extinct between 48,000 and 37,000 years ago.

The oldest green algae preserved in three dimensions may hint that plants originated earlier than previously believed.

Scientific study of human evolution historically reassured us of a comforting order to things. It has painted humans as as cleverer, more intellectual and caring than our ancestral predecessors…Over the last five years discoveries have upended this unbalanced view.

A new examination of some of the oldest rocks in the world suggests that the first continents on Earth were unstable, and sank back into the mantle before making their way out again and reforming.