An ape skull found in a Chinese tomb might belong to a previously unknown gibbon — one that was driven to extinction within the past two millennia, researchers report on 21 June in Science. Image: Samuel Turvey/ZSL
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Many people think they know what happened to the dodo – but the popular story of its extinction is actually littered with errors. It’s symptomatic of the shameful way the iconic bird has been treated since its extinction. Arguably, we have lost the dodo twice more since then. Image: L. Claessens
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In the late 1980s, as the world’s governments were waking up to the problem of climate change, the mud at the bottom of the ocean near Antarctica revealed a surprise. Earth had lived through rapid global warming before. Image: tauntingpanda
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Good news or bad? The latest update to the IUCN Red List shows many species are in decline – but no additions to the Extinct category. Even so, evidence is growing that the world is entering another period of mass extinction. Image: Austronesian Expeditions
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All things must pass. That includes life on Earth, which will surely be wiped out eventually. But how long does it have? Image: Image Editor
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Out of crisis comes opportunity. An asteroid-triggered mass extinction 65 million years ago famously wiped out the dinosaurs – but it may also have helped establish the modern reef fish communities. Image: Foto di Spalle
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What caused the largest mass extinction of them all? A meteorite strike like the one that seems to have sealed the fate of the dinosaurs? Volcanic or tectonic convulsions?The ravages of a humble microbe? To the long list of possible culprits and accomplices we can now add another, controversial entry – fracking. Image: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
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Asteroids 2, dinosaurs 0. The infamous space rock that slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and helped wipe it clean of large dinosaurs may have been a binary – two asteroids orbiting each other. The surprise conclusion comes from a re-evaluation of the proportion of asteroid craters on Earth that were formed from binary impacts. Image: Calsidyrose
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Billions of years ago, a tiny cyanobacterium cracked open a water molecule – and let loose a poison that wrought death and destruction on an epic scale. Now, for the first time, geologists have found evidence of the crucial evolutionary stage just before photosynthesising cyanobacteria split water and began generating oxygen – the moment that made the modern world. Image: Specious Reasons
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Fred Guterl tries to kill off humankind in a series of apocalyptic thought experiments in The Fate...
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It is five years since Richard Fortey retired from his post as senior palaeontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. Yet that has hardly curbed his academic output or the enthusiasm that drove him to study fossils for more than half a century. If anything, he is rapidly cementing his position as one of his field’s great survivors. Image: U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Northeast Region
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The fate of the dinosaurs may have been sealed half a billion years before life even appeared, by two geological time bombs that still lurk near our planet’s core. A controversial new hypothesis links massive eruptions of lava that coincided with many of Earth’s largest extinctions to two unusually hot blobs of mantle 2800 kilometres beneath the crust. Image: gnuckx
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