Prehistoric Flora & Fauna
Paleontologists have discovered what they say is the oldest macrofossil evidence of Paullinieae, a diverse group of tropical and subtropical climbing plants that belong to the soapberry family Sapindaceae.
A study published in Cretaceous Research expands the paleontological richness of continental fossils of the Lower Cretaceous with the discovery of a new water plant (charophytes), the species Mesochara dobrogeica. The study also...
Sunny forests morphed into the dark, dense ones that are typical today.
A research study sheds new light upon an ongoing debate among conservation biologists: whether we should conserve sets of endangered species, or whether we should preserve ecosystem functioning, that is, the processes inherent to ecosystems, including those that...
Paleontologists have found an exceptionally preserved short-winged flower beetle and associated pollen aggregations and coprolites in a piece of mid-Cretaceous...
About 66 million years ago (the end of the Cretaceous period), a 10-km-wide asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The impact unleashed an incredible amount of climate-changing gases into the...
It’s widely accepted that the primary reason dinosaurs were wiped off the face of the planet was a devastating impact from an asteroid. The ...
The deep ice at Camp Century in northwestern Greenland entirely melted at least once within the last million years and was covered with vegetation, including moss and perhaps trees, according to a paper...
Spectacular fossil plants preserved within a volcanic ash fall in China have shed light on an evolutionary race 300 million years ago, which was eventually won by the seed-bearing plants that dominate so much of the Earth today.
