The cat came back. so to speak. Actually, extinct Simbakubwa kutokaafrika was not a cat but a hyaenodont, larger than a polar bear, with three rows of shearing teeth. Found between 1978 and 1981, the jawbone had to be stored on special shelving due to its size.
extinction
Drone finds Hawaiian plant, believed extinct
The plant, Hibiscadelphus woodii, was formally discovered in 1991 and had been declared extinct in 2016: In 2016, the same year the plant was listed extinct, the National Tropical Botanical Garden teamed up with drone operator Ben Nyberg to supplement the work of intrepid scientists like Wood, who rappel down cliffs and trudge through rainforests […]
Is there a fixed time limit for recovery after mass extinctions?
While this may turn out to be true, the apparently fixed rate of change implies a more regulated system than the random developments that we are used to associating with evolution.
Learning more about the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs
If the ejecta traveled so far, perhaps crises of this type might help explain some of the odd genomes we encounter.
Insectologists swat insects-are-doomed paper
The temptation for some seems to be to resort to apocalypse voodoo to demonstrate a crisis, at the expense of the methods that make scientists worth listening to, as an alternative to supermarket tabloids. File this one with: The real reasons people don’t “trust science”
Insects in decline? Science writer says it’s myth
Ridley discusses several other scare claims that did not survive scrutiny and notes that the best estimate is that insect species are dying out at rates simliar to mammals and birds (1 to 5 per cent per century): “A problem, but not Armageddon.”
Move over, bee! Tortoise, feared extinct, turns up again
As with Wallace’s giant bee, also feared extinct, the researchers had gone out looking for the tortoise.
Alfred Russel Wallace’s giant bee turns out not to be extinct
Wallace “described the female bee, which is about as long as an adult human’s thumb and about four times larger than a European honeybee, as ‘a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.'” – One of the finders
Researchers: Biodiversity today is not higher than in the past
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.
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 […]