Scientists discover earliest known seed-eating perching bird in Fossil Lake, Wyo
Most of the birds you've ever seen--sparrows, finches, robins, crows--have one crucial thing in common: they're all what scientists refer to as perching birds,...
How does the Amazon rain forest cope with drought
The Amazon rain forest isn't necessarily a place that many would associate with a drought, yet prolonged dry spells are projected to become more...
Grand Canyon National Park turns 100
How a place once called ‘valueless’ became grand
Few sights are as instantly recognizable, and few sites speak more fully to American nationalism. Standing on...
Dark fiber lays groundwork for long-distance earthquake detection and groundwater mapping
Berkeley Lab researchers capture a detailed picture of how earthquakes travel through the Earth's subsurface.
In traditional seismology, researchers studying how the earth moves in...
Much of the surface ocean will shift in color by end of 21st century
A new MIT study finds that over the coming decades climate change will affect the ocean’s color, intensifying its blue regions and its green...
Neanderthals were sprinters rather than distance runners
The image of Neanderthals as brutish and culturally unsophisticated has changed in recent years – they could make cave art, jewellery, complex stone tools...
How old is earth’s inner core? We finally know
Earth’s inner core is younger than scientists previously thought, according to new research.
The findings offer new insight into the history of Earth’s magnetic shielding...
Earth’s largest extinction likely took plants first
This is a view of Coalcliff in New South Wales, Australia, where researchers discovered evidence that Earth's largest extinction may have extinguished plant life...
The 210-million-year-old archosaur was crushing bones like a hyena
Coprolites, or fossil droppings, of the dinosaur-like archosaur Smok wawelski contain lots of chewed-up bone fragments.
This led researchers at Uppsala University to conclude that this top...
‘Antarctic king’ shows how life at the South Pole bounced back after mass extinction
Antarctica wasn't always a frozen wasteland--250 million years ago, it was covered in forests and rivers, and the temperature rarely dipped below freezing.
It was...