That wasn’t what we expected to hear, of course. But it makes sense that there would usually be as many animals of interdependent types as could physically support themselves in the environment.
extinction
Can DNA survival change the meaning of extinction?
Actually, it is widely suspected that the red wolf is, generally, a hybrid of wolf and coyote that appears from time to time and thus can’t go extinct unless one of the two parent groups does.
Human extinction as collateral damage
Recently, Clemson U philosopher Todd May whistled through the system on the pros and cons of human extinction: May’s reasoning is fascinatingly nihilistic. He argues that human extinction would be tragic because we have a tragic flaw – our shortsighted use of the environment – which would be recitified by our extinction. “Humanity,” he says, […]
Could giant marine animals have been wiped out 2.6 million years ago by a supernova?
In a puzzling extinction, something took out giant shark Megalodon and 36% of big marine animals generally. Researcher: “There really hasn’t been any good explanation for the marine megafaunal extinction. This could be one. It’s this paradigm change — we know something happened and when it happened, so for the first time we can really dig in and look for things in a definite way.
Smithsonian: The asteroid strike was only one factor in dinosaur extinction
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and produced cataclysmic disruptions that, it is believed, killed off about 75% of species (the K/Pg extinction). But many researchers think there must have been other factors at work.
New analysis: Siberian “unicorns” co-existed with people
According to a recent study dating the 23 available fragments of the bones of the giant, extinct rhinoceros, Elasmotherium sibericum (3.4 tonnes): The results were surprising: they were dated to a range of times after the animals were thought to be extinct, with the most recent being between 35,000 to 36,000 years ago. By this […]
Humans “off the hook” for ancient African mammal extinction?
Only five species of massive herbivores are left and some say humans killed off the others: Writing in the journal Science, Tyler Faith, from the Natural History Museum of Utah, and colleagues argue that long-term environmental change drove the extinctions. This mainly took the form of an expansion of grasslands, in response to falling atmospheric […]
Mystery: Extinct birds as well adapted for flight as surviving modern ones
But they aren’t the ancestors of the modern ones. They died out, but why? From ScienceDaily: “We know that birds in the early Cretaceous, about 115 to 130 million years ago, were capable of flight but probably not as well adapted for it as modern birds,” said Atterholt, who is now an assistant professor and […]
Assumed extinct, tree kangaroo reappears
The wondiwoi was spotted by an expedition led by amateur botanist Michael White, who spends vacations looking for rare flora: The Wondiwoi tree kangaroo had not been collected, seen, or reported since that first sighting [in 1928]. Despite weighing up to 35 pounds, tree kangaroos are remarkably cryptic, often remaining totally hidden high in the […]
Extinction: When evolution is suddenly found to have a purpose
And human beings do too, apparently. From ScienceDaily: The sixth mass extinction is underway, this time caused by humans. A team of researchers have calculated that species are dying out so quickly that nature’s built-in defense mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. If current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct […]
Researchers: Fossil record “dramatically distorted”
From ScienceDaily: Using the fossil record to accurately estimate the timing and pace of past mass extinctions is no easy task, and a new study highlights how fossil evidence can produce a misleading picture if not interpreted with care. Florida Museum of Natural History researchers used a series of 130-foot cores drilled from the Po […]
Humans lived in Madagascar 6000 years earlier than thought
And probably did not kill off all the elephant birds, as often claimed, say researchers: Analysis of bones, from what was once the world’s largest bird, has revealed that humans arrived on the tropical island of Madagascar more than 6,000 years earlier than previously thought—according to a study published today, 12 September 2018, in the journal […]
In the latest version: Cold climate helped to do in the Neanderthals
From ScienceDaily: A team of researchers from a number of European and American research institutions, including Northumbria University, Newcastle, have produced detailed new natural records from stalagmites that highlight changes in the European climate more than 40,000 years ago. They found several cold periods that coincide with the timings of a near complete absence of […]
Just in: Evolution favors the survival of the laziest!
The latest entry in the hot-weather laziness debate, which started as, Did homo erectus die out because he was lazy and technologically conservative? A new large-data study of fossil and extant bivalves and gastropods in the Atlantic Ocean suggests laziness might be a fruitful strategy for survival of individuals, species and even communities of […]
Researchers: Homo erectus died out because he was lazy and very conservative
We don’t hear as much old-fashioned moralizing these days as we used to but this looks like the authentic product from ScienceDaily: Laziness helped lead to extinction of Homo erectus An archaeological excavation of ancient human populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Early Stone Age, found that Homo erectus used ‘least-effort strategies’ for tool […]