All posts tagged: extinction

Ancient oceans started to suffocate 8 million years before the Triassic mass extinction

Ancient oceans started to suffocate 8 million years before the Triassic mass extinction

Published by Jenni Sidey

The end-Triassic extinction is often overshadowed by the disaster that killed the dinosaurs, but on its own it ranks among the worst biological crises in Earth’s history. Around 201 million years ago, roughly 60 percent of marine invertebrate genera disappeared, along with many other forms of life on land and in the sea. Now, a new study suggests the oceans had been sliding toward trouble long before the main collapse arrived. By tracing chemical signals preserved in ancient rocks from Alaska, geologists found that oxygen loss in marine waters began nearly 8 million years before the end-Triassic mass extinction itself. The finding shifts the timeline of environmental decline backward and raises a harder question: what started the damage so early? The work, led by researchers at Virginia Tech and published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, points to a drawn-out ocean crisis rather than a single sudden blow. In their reading of the rock record, marine ecosystems in part of the vast Panthalassic Ocean were already under stress well before the better-known volcanic catastrophe at …

Quiet for 100,000 years, Greece’s Methana volcano may be making a comeback

Quiet for 100,000 years, Greece’s Methana volcano may be making a comeback

Published by Jenni Sidey

Methana volcano looked dead for more than 100,000 years, yet magma kept building below ground. By dating tiny crystals, scientists found a hidden system still active, raising new doubts about how safely “extinct” volcanoes are judged around the world. For more than 100,000 years, the Methana volcano in Greece appeared quiet and lifeless. No lava spilled down its slopes. No ash clouds darkened the sky. To anyone watching from the surface, the volcano seemed extinct. But deep underground, the story was very different. An international research team led by ETH Zurich has revealed that Methana was not dead at all. Instead, enormous amounts of magma continued building beneath the volcano during its long silent period. The findings challenge one of the most common assumptions in volcanology: that a volcano quiet for tens of thousands of years is no longer dangerous. The study paints a striking picture of a volcano slowly “breathing” underground while remaining calm at the surface. Researchers say this hidden growth may happen at many volcanoes worldwide, especially in regions shaped by subduction …

Why flowering plants survived Earth’s greatest extinction while dinosaurs did not

Why flowering plants survived Earth’s greatest extinction while dinosaurs did not

Published by Jenni Sidey

Flowering plants survived Earth’s worst disasters, including the asteroid strike that ended the dinosaurs, while many others vanished. A sweeping genomic analysis suggests ancient DNA doubling may have helped them endure upheaval, opening a new window on resilience in a warming world. Sixty-six million years ago, a giant asteroid slammed into Earth and changed life forever. The impact wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and devastated ecosystems across the planet. Fires spread, sunlight dimmed and food chains collapsed. Yet somehow, many flowering plants survived. A new study from Ghent University suggests those survivors may have carried a hidden advantage deep inside their DNA. Researchers found that many flowering plants endured ancient climate catastrophes after accidentally duplicating their entire genomes. The findings come from one of the largest analyses ever conducted on flowering plant genomes. Scientists studied 470 species and traced ancient genome duplication events across more than 100 million years of plant evolution. Their results revealed a striking pattern. Many successful genome duplications appeared during periods of severe environmental turmoil, including mass extinctions, rapid warming events …

Colossal claims an artificial eggshell will help it bring back the moa

Colossal claims an artificial eggshell will help it bring back the moa

Published by skeptic

The moa, a large, extinct bird, was native to New Zealand MARK P. WITTON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The extinct, flightless moas of New Zealand stood over 3 metres tall and weighed over 200 kilograms. Their eggs were larger than those of any living bird – a problem for Colossal Biosciences, which is aiming to bring them back to life. Now, the company claims to have developed an artificial eggshell consisting of a lattice supporting a transparent silicone membrane, which it says will enable it to create eggs as large as those of the moa. Is this the first-ever artificial bird egg? Colossal does use the term “artificial egg” in its press release, but it is really just an artificial eggshell. Either way, it isn’t a first – in fact, it’s possible to remove chicken eggs from their shells and hatch them from anything from plastic cups to cling film. However, the survival rate is usually low because, without an eggshell, the developing chicks may not get enough oxygen. A number of teams around the world have …

Man Behind Simulation Hypothesis Warns That Extinction of Humanity Is a Risk We Have to Take

Man Behind Simulation Hypothesis Warns That Extinction of Humanity Is a Risk We Have to Take

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Even if you don’t know Nick Bostrom’s name, you’re almost certainly familiar with the idea he’s most famous for. Back in 2003, when he was at Oxford, Bostrom penned an influential philosophical paper with the incredible title of “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Loosely speaking, his argument was that sufficiently advanced civilizations will eventually build sophisticated simulations of their own ancestors — and that, given enough time in the simulation, those simulated beings will develop their own simulation inside the simulation, where a new set of simulated ancestors will do the same thing, ad infinitum. You probably get a sense where this is headed: with all these layers of simulated reality, Bostrom thinks that it’s very unlikely that us humans are actually living in the original “base” reality. Instead, we’re statistically probably in some tranche of an Escher-esque cosmic videogame. Needless to say, the whole thing sparked decades of debate. Big names including Elon Musk have …

Emperor penguins are on the march — toward extinction

Emperor penguins are on the march — toward extinction

Published by skeptic

Antarctica: A continent mostly covered in ice, which sits in the southernmost part of the world. breed: (verb) To produce offspring through reproduction. climate change: Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests. conservation: (v. conserve) The act of preserving or protecting something. The focus of this work can range from art objects to endangered species and other aspects of the natural environment. continent: (in geology) The huge land masses that sit upon tectonic plates. In modern times, there are six established geologic continents: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. In 2017, scientists also made the case for yet another: Zealandia. crustaceans: Hard-shelled water-dwelling animals including lobsters, crabs and shrimp. endangered: An adjective used to describe species at risk of going extinct. extinction: (adj. extinct) The permanent loss of a species, family or larger group of organisms. global warming: The gradual increase in the overall temperature of Earth’s atmosphere due to the greenhouse …

We’re still recovering from losing the woolly mammoth

We’re still recovering from losing the woolly mammoth

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. There’s a gaping 2,000-pound hole in Earth’s food web. Saber-toothed cats with 7-inch-long fangs, sloths the size of elephants, wombats the size of cars, and many of the world’s largest mammals disappeared between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. While 10,000 years may seem long ago to humans, that’s a blink of an eye in evolutionary  time, and the disappearance of these megafauna still impacts us today. of.  According to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), disappearing megafauna fundamentally reshaped the food web for modern animals. These effects are also more pronounced in North and South Americas than in other continents. The world’s food webs all have the same basic principle—animals that eat are then eaten by others. When an animal goes extinct, the complex web of relationships shifts among the surviving species. If a predator disappears, their prey’s population may go unchecked, with a series of cascading effects. Based on previous …

Scientists discover how primitive plants survived Earth’s worst mass extinction

Scientists discover how primitive plants survived Earth’s worst mass extinction

Published by Jenni Sidey

Following the worst mass extinction event on Earth, the land was not entirely barren of life. In the wake of this cataclysm, when forests mostly disappeared and many familiar plant species were lost, a unique group of plants emerged and proliferated across the planet. These plants were lycophytes. They were spore-producing plants. Recent findings indicate that they survived by utilizing a different approach to photosynthetic carbon assimilation. Specifically, this approach involved utilizing the cooler hours of the night for part of their carbon intake. This hypothesis regarding the effect of extensive volcanism in the Siberian Traps that contributed to the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, approximately 252 million years ago, the event commonly referred to as The Great Dying, is particularly significant. It was not merely an environmental disaster. The Great Dying marked the extinction of 81% of all marine species and the extinction of nearly 89% of all tetrapod genera on the terrestrial surface. Consequently, this event was accompanied by intense volcanism, significant increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and extensive periods of persistently elevated global temperature. …

Critically endangered Borneo orangutan born at Madrid zoo

Critically endangered Borneo orangutan born at Madrid zoo

Published by Sam Flores

A critically endangered Borneo orangutan has been born at Madrid’s zoo, described by keepers as strong and developing normally. After an eight-and-a-half-month pregnancy, mother Surya gave birth to a male weighing about 1.5 kilos on April 2, the Madrid Zoo Aquarium said in a statement. The zoo released a video showing Surya cradling the newborn, which will be named through a public vote from a list of options proposed by the caretakers. Surya has now given birth to four offspring, with keepers describing her maternal care from the outset as exemplary, and the baby feeding regularly, a key indicator of healthy development. In this handout photo released on April 14, 2026 by Madrid Zoo Aquarium, Surya, a female Bornean orangutan, cradles her newborn shortly after its birth on April 2, 2026 at the Madrid Zoo Aquarium, in Madrid. © Madrid Zoo Aquarium via AFP “When the baby is nursing, everything stops. She stays completely still until he finishes, and only then moves to eat or do anything else. She is a real supermom,” said Maica …

Hidden fossils reveal secrets of oceans before major mass extinction

Hidden fossils reveal secrets of oceans before major mass extinction

Published by skeptic

One of the radiolarian fossils found inside the rock sample Courtesy of Jonathan Aitchison A tiny pellet of ancient rock, a mere half the size of a grain of rice, has yielded 20 microscopic fossils representing eight different species, including one that is entirely new to science. The discovery will enhance our understanding of the second-largest known mass extinction. It also shows how new analytical techniques are unlocking parts of the fossil record that have previously gone overlooked. Jonathan Aitchison at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues extracted the pellet from a rock that was collected in late 2018 from the Sichuan basin in China, about 300 kilometres south of Xian. The rock is445 million years old, which means it formed just before the Late Ordovician mass extinction – the second most severe to have occurred over the past 500 million years. Inside the pellet, they found eight different species of radiolarians, which are single-celled plankton that make their shells from silica. Radiolarians are still found throughout the oceans today. The fossils found …