Earth news stories

Fossilized trees discovered by chance in southwest England belong to Earth’s earliest-known forest, new research has found. The 390 million-year-old fossils supplant the Gilboa fossil forest in New York state, which dates back 386 million years, as the world’s oldest known forest.

Nestled within the photosynthetic, or light-eating, tissue of the boreal trees – and within the bountiful cloud-like lichens and feathery mosses that carpet the ground between them – are fungi. These fungi are endophytes, meaning they live within plants, often in a mutually beneficial arrangement. See the research here.

Roughly 128 million years ago, snakes suddenly burst into an abundant existence on Earth, eventually diversifying into the 4,000 or so species we see today. See the research in Science.

The dismissal of a concept that has already been recognised in UN declarations and is a fundamental belief of many Indigenous communities was described by critics as shameful, contradictory and undemocratic.

Two studies of ayahuasca ceremony participants found that at least 50% of these individuals had an ayahuasca-induced personal death experience. These experiences were associated with an increased sense that consciousness will continue after death and increased concerns for the environment. The paper was published in the Frontiers in Psychiatry.

It’s called Tridentinosaurus antiquus, excavated in 1931, and considered a truly remarkable find. Dating to 280 million years ago, before the dinosaurs, it was thought to represent one of the oldest lizard fossils ever found…Well, now we know why we’ve never found another fossil like it: that soft tissue, according to a new, painstaking analysis, is not soft tissue at all. It’s paint. The research has been published in Palaeontology.

Scholars of antiquity believe they are on the brink of a new era of understanding after researchers armed with artificial intelligence read the hidden text of a charred scroll that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago.

The evidence comes from a chemical analysis of more than 100 tiny pieces of rock entrained within the White Continent’s ice, researchers report in the Feb. 1 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Rare tree fossils preserved with their leaves have an architecture unlike any plant known today and represent the earliest evidence of smaller trees growing beneath the forest canopy. See the study, published in the journal Current Biology.

A study has found that playing a soundscape to a common, plant-promoting fungus found in soil caused it to grow more rapidly than fungi that weren’t exposed to sound. The novel ‘eco-acoustic’ approach has the potential to restore damaged ecosystems.

Image from: Plogeo (Wiki Commons)

A detailed investigation of asteroid Ryugu samples has provided further evidence that the organic molecules which gave rise to life to our planet were brought here by ancient comets.

Were dinosaurs already on their way out when an asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, ending the Cretaceous, the geologic period that started about 145 million years ago? It’s a question that has vexed paleontologists like us for more than 40 years.

This story begins with a funeral. On my 33rd birthday in June, I entered my coffin on five grams of mushrooms, had it “nailed” shut, and listened while sixteen friends delivered eulogies as the soundtrack to my trip.

About 8,200 years ago, an underwater landslide known as the Storegga slide near Norway triggered a tsunami that engulfed parts of northern Europe. Around the same time, there was a massive dip in Britain’s population. See the research here.