When the dinosaurs died, lichens thrived

When an asteroid smacked into the Earth 66 million years ago, it triggered mass extinctions all over the planet. The most famous victims were the dinosaurs, but early birds, insects, and other life forms took a hit too. The ...

Early Earth may have been a 'waterworld'

Kevin Costner, eat your heart out. New research shows that the early Earth, home to some of our planet's first lifeforms, may have been a real-life "waterworld"— without a continent in sight.

First plants caused ice ages: research

New research reveals how the arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages. Led by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford, the study is published today (February 1, 2012) in Nature Geoscience.

Size of mammals exploded after dinosaur extinction

Researchers demonstrate that the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago made way for mammals to get bigger - about a thousand times bigger than they had been. The study, which is published in the prestigious journal ...

Weighing the Antarctic ice sheet

One of the last big unknowns in the global climate equation is Antarctica. How stable is the Antarctic ice sheet? More than a mile thick, on average, it locks up 70 percent of the Earth's fresh water.

Fragments of continents hidden under lava in the Indian Ocean

The islands Reunion and Mauritius, both well-known tourist destinations, are hiding a micro-continent, which has now been discovered. The continent fragment known as Mauritia detached about 60 million years ago while Madagascar ...

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