A newly described fossil from South Australia is making waves in our understanding of where and when whales evolved titanic body sizes.
The fossil deposits at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles have well-preserved remains of many prehistoric animals that got stuck in natural asphalt seeps over the past 60,000 years.
Cullen Townsend, courtesy of NHMLAC
Emily Lindsey, University of California, Los Angeles; Lisa N. Martinez, University of California, Los Angeles, and Regan E. Dunn, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
New findings from the La Brea Tar Pits in southern California suggest human-caused wildfires in the region, along with a warming climate, led to the loss of most of the area’s large mammals.
Animals that shared the landscape with humans disappeared as the ice age ended.
Mauricio Antón/Wikimedia Commons
A forensic technique more often used at modern crime scenes identified blood residue from large extinct animals on spearpoints and stone tools used by people who lived in the Carolinas millennia ago.
Julien Louys, Griffith University; Gilbert Price, The University of Queensland; Mathieu Duval, Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), and Robin Beck, University of Salford
80,000 years ago, Australia’s landscape was dominated by much larger versions of today’s marsupials – including enigmatic and enormous wombats.
A short-tailed weasel in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
Jacob W. Frank, NPS/Flickr
Polar bears and wolves may get the glory, but small predators like weasels, foxes and their cousins play outsized ecological roles. And many of these species are declining fast.
A peculiar giant kangaroo that once lived in New Guinea would have descended from a much more ancient form that migrated from Australia, between 5 million and 8 million years ago.
Genyornis newtoni was one of the biggest birds ever to walk the earth. And new research shows its mysterious extinction may have come amid a bout of widespread bone disease as its lake home dried out.
The famous deaths of moas and dodos has fed a narrative in which humans are agents of extinction for island-dwelling animals. But research suggests this only recently became the case.
A feral donkey in the Sonoran Desert.
Michael Lundgren
This newly discovered ancient monk seal is challenging previous theories about how and where monachine seals evolved. It’s the biggest breakthrough in seal evolution research in about 70 years.
Tooth fossils from NSW have confirmed sauropods weren’t exclusive to Queensland. They’re also providing a first look at how these colossal dinosaurs fed from Australia’s land.
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University