Nov 19, 2018
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Volcanic eruptions once caused mass extinctions in the oceans – could climate change do the same?
All animals, whether they live on land or in the water, require oxygen to breathe. But today the world's oceans are losing oxygen, due to a combination of rising temperatures and changing ocean currents. Both factors are ...
Capitalism is killing the world's wildlife populations, not 'humanity'
The latest Living Planet report from the WWF makes for grim reading: a 60% decline in wild animal populations since 1970, collapsing ecosystems, and a distinct possibility that the human species will not be far behind. The ...
Nature pushed to the brink by 'runaway consumption'
Unbridled consumption has decimated global wildlife, triggered a mass extinction and exhausted Earth's capacity to accommodate humanity's expanding appetites, the conservation group WWF warned Tuesday.
Nature under assault: key indicators
The World Wildlife Fund and partners have tracked population changes in Earth's animal species for decades. News from the latest "Living Planet" report, released Tuesday, is more grim than ever.
Extinction is forever—and ecosystem recovery takes a really, really long time
Researchers from the University of Leeds studying fossil data surrounding the Permo-Triassic (P-Tr) extinction of 252 million years (Ma) ago found that a marine ecosystem, in comparison with the taxonomic genera that comprise ...
Mammals cannot evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis
Palaeontology: A way of reaching into the past to build lessons for the present
South Africa has an unparalleled fossil record of prehistoric life. It also holds a key position within the African nursery of humankind. And so, the country's palaeontology tells the story not just of those who live in it, ...
Well established theories on patterns in evolution might be wrong
How do the large-scale patterns observed in evolution arise? A new paper in the journal Evolution by researchers at Uppsala University and University of Leeds argues that many of them are a type of statistical artefact caused ...
End-Permian extinction, which wiped out most of Earth's species, was instantaneous in geological time
The most severe mass extinction in Earth's history occurred with almost no early warning signs, according to a new study by scientists at MIT, China, and elsewhere.
