Earth news stories

Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered that the vast anatomical variety of fungi stems from evolutionary increases in multicellular complexity.

Distinctive and rare rock crystals were moved over long distances by Early Neolithic Brits and were used to mark their burial sites, according to groundbreaking new archaeological research.

To date, Earth is the only planet we know of that has continents. Exactly how they formed and evolved is unclear, but we do know – because the edges of continents thousands of miles apart match up – that, at one time long ago, Earth’s landmass was concentrated in one big supercontinent.

A California-based organisation wants to harness the power of machine learning to decode communication across the entire animal kingdom. But the project has its doubters

The study, conducted by research groups based in France and Chile, is the first to document a seaweed species that depends on small marine crustaceans bespeckled in pollen-like spores to reproduce.

A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic jackpot: a treasure trove of 183 million-year-old fossils.

A new Curtin University study has found that water was transported much deeper in the early Earth than previously thought, shedding new light on how the continents were originally formed.

Researchers have been able to use an analysis of ancient rock crystals – and the magnetism records locked inside them – to trace back the history of Earth’s inner core across hundreds of millions of years.

Evidence from 252m years ago shows surviving animals bounced back stronger, fitter, faster and smarter.

While studying diamonds inside an ancient meteorite, scientists have found a strange, interwoven microscopic structure that has never been seen before.

Groundwater that was recently discovered deep underground in a mine in South Africa is estimated to be 1.2 billion years old. Researchers suspect that the  groundwater is some of the oldest on the planet, and its chemical interactions with the surrounding rock could offer new insights about energy production and storage in Earth’s crust.

The death of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But the history of mammals stretches far deeper than that. The first mammals go back about 325 million years, when the ancestral mammal lineage split from the reptile line.

Scientists can use various clues to figure out what’s under Earth’s surface without actually having to do any digging – including firing super-fine lasers thinner than a human hair at minerals found in beach sand.

New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world’s earliest seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.

Image from: Image:Oceania ISO 3166-1.svg (Wiki Commons)

Formation of solid iron core 550m years ago restored magnetic field and protected surface.