Sexual dimorphism is the concept that the male and female counterparts of the same species have differing morphologies. Whilst it may be easy to tell the difference in extant organisms, how can you differentiate sex when you have flattened shells that are almost half a billion years old?…
The bones of terrestrial vertebrates are often found in riverine sediments. However, this doesn’t always mean they were living nearby. The sheer nature of fluvial sediments means there is often a spectrum of distances travelled from origin to final deposition, especially when it comes to the interaction of bones with fluid flow.…
Fifty years ago, palaeontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould published one of the most provocative ideas in evolutionary science: punctuated equilibria. In their 1972 paper, they argued that species don’t always evolve through slow, steady change. Instead, the fossil record shows long periods of stasis, times when species remain remarkably stable, interrupted by brief bursts of evolutionary innovation linked to the origin of new species.
When we picture mosasaurs, the giant marine reptiles that ruled the oceans during the Late Cretaceous, we often imagine long, snake-like monsters propelling through the water. But what did their tails really look like? The fossil record rarely preserves the soft tissues from which fins and muscles are constructed, leaving paleontologists with only bones to infer what these propulsive features may have looked like.
The first geographically widespread animals in geological history appear in the Ediacaran period, in the Avalon assemblage, between 574 and 560 million years ago. The first animal communities were host to strange and unfamiliar organisms known as rangeomorphs and arboreomorphs, as well as more recognisable cnidarians (invertebrates like sea anemone and jellyfish).
A new study of from the Middle Ordovician of Estonia reveals some of the earliest evidence for parasitism in the fossil record.…
https://doi.org/10.1017/pab.2024.33 Since the 1980s Precambrian palaeontologists believed that early eukaryotes (Domain: Eukarya, microorganisms with a membrane bound nucleus) underwent a dramatic diversification in the Tonian Period (1000-720Ma).…
https://doi.org/10.1017/pab.2025.4 From its revolutionary beginnings in 1975, and an aim to marry biology and palaeontology to answer key evolutionary questions, Paleobiology continues to put innovative fossil and evolution research at its forefront.…
Trilobites- extinct marine arthropods that roamed the world’s oceans from about 520 million years ago until they went extinct 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period – may have grown in a similar fashion and reached ages that match those of extant crustaceans, a new study has found.…
Past extinction events are key to understanding how modern life will respond to climate change. For ecologists who study communities of interacting organisms, the fossil record holds a wealth of information about how different species react to environmental perturbations, but with a major drawback — it only captures species with bones and shells.
Perhaps no Cambrian invertebrate can claim greater public enthusiasm than Anomalocaris. Not only is it bizarre looking – the story of its discovery, being pieced together from fragments thought to belong to different animals, is uniquely compelling.…
With a total length of up to 5.5m, the tiger shark is one of the largest predatory sharks known today. This shark is a cosmopolitan species occurring in all oceans worldwide.…
Extinct dinosaurs are popular subjects in many CGI-animated movies, documentaries and TV shows, but how they are portrayed as living, breathing animals often depends on a lot of guesswork.…
Just as humans and squirrels are part of the larger group called mammals, mammals are part of a larger group of animals called synapsids.…
The duck-billed hadrosaurs walked the Earth over 90-million years ago and were one of the most successful groups of dinosaurs. But why were these 2-3 tonne giants so successful?…
Studying how biodiversity on our planet has developed through time and how it reacted to environmental changes would be relatively straight-forward if we could time-travel, as ecologists.…
Biodiversity hotspots and gradients are a striking feature across the globe today. While the Latitudinal Diversity Gradient is the best known of these biodiversity patterns, strong gradients in species richness also exist in relation to topography and habitat heterogeneity.…
A new special issue from the Journal of Paleontology, brings together a collection of 17 papers focused on different aspects of echinoderm paleobiology. Author David F. Wright discusses his article 'Bayesian estimation of fossil phylogenies and the evolution of early to middle Paleozoic crinoids (Echinodermata)'.
A paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature is countering decades of studies that assert that some dinosaurs can be identified as male or female based on the shapes and sizes of their bones.
A new study in Paleobiology has compared the diet of a variety of Australian megafaunal herbivores from the period when they were widespread (350,000 to 570,000 years ago) to a period when they were in decline (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) by studying their fossil teeth. The analysis suggests that climate change had a significant impact on their diets and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction.
Q&A with Editor-in-Chief of the Precision Medicine Journal, Dame Anna Dominiczak, for International day of Women and Girls in Science
How long will humankind survive? Besides the fact that we have been able to eliminate ourselves with nuclear weapons for decades, even without a third world war, the challenge to take care of the resources of our planet remains; we need to use them in a way that our children and their children can have a place on Earth as well. In this blog post Andreas Losch discusses his recent review article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
In this post Niva Golan-Nadir and Daniel Smith expand on their recent Politics and Religion article ‘From religious to secular perspectives of religion and state – tracing the American Blue law‘.…
Even though findings from genetics and other sciences unequivocally refute biological conceptions of race, this erroneous viewpoint remains widespread among the general public.…
In January, my husband and I (Sam) took our six-year-old daughter to get a flu shot at a local pharmacy. As she became increasingly bored in the waiting room, she began to offer commentary, asking the closed door, “Doctor, when are you coming out?”…
Why understanding contemporary youth militancy demands history Al-Shabaab fighters patrolling Afgooye-Mogadishu road (2025) In civil war-era Somalia in the early 1990s, global media headlines about ‘stoned teenagers’ cruising Mogadishu on jeeps mounted with machine guns became synonymous with the construction of Somalia as a ‘chaotic African country’ in which one could be killed for nothing more than ‘the clothes on your back’ (New York Times, 1992).…
How long will humankind survive? Besides the fact that we have been able to eliminate ourselves with nuclear weapons for decades, even without a third world war, the challenge to take care of the resources of our planet remains; we need to use them in a way that our children and their children can have a place on Earth as well. In this blog post Andreas Losch discusses his recent review article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
It is an article of faith among ordinary Filipinos that American troops will die with Filipino troops defending Philippine claims to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea (SCS).…
Q&A with Editor-in-Chief of the Precision Medicine Journal, Dame Anna Dominiczak, for International day of Women and Girls in Science
More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.
This is the first post in our new series: “Conversations with Authors.” For our inaugural post, we asked Dr. Vesla Weaver to meet (virtually) with Dr.…
The March article of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International is the first blog of the series. The blog is written by Dr Dami Ajayi, Specialty Doctor, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Trainee/Blog Editor, BJPsych International.…
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
Listen to @BBCRadio4's Start the Week, featuring @NineDotsPrize winner @jkkusiak, talking about her book, 'Radically Legal'. Learn how a group of ordinary people inspired the book when they reclaimed over 240,000 apartments back from corporate landlords 🔗
Start the Week - ‘Left behind’, but not forgotten - BBC Sounds
Tom Sutcliffe with Paul Collier, Joanna Kusiak and Matthew Xia.
cup.org
Sparking curiosity from geopolitics in Japan to the cultural implications of AI!
Explore the seven new titles we are welcoming to Cambridge and the seven #OpenAccess titles we are launching in 2025 🚀 🔗 https://cup.org/3yhAuAx
Our Flip it Open programme has published titles from authors @GibbsSpike, @liederfollower and Inés Valdez!
Discover how we are funding the publication of #OpenAccess books without changing purchasing habits 🔗 https://cup.org/4diDHii
;
