news 2023

Islands are biodiversity hotspots and are home to animal species with unique characteristics, including dwarf specimens, which have evolved to very small sizes compared to their mainland relatives, and giants. An international study now reports that these species are at higher risk of extinction. The findings are supported by software developed by Daniele Silvestro of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) at the University of Fribourg.

Billions of sea anemones adorn the bottom of the Earth's oceans - yet they are among the rarest of fossils because their squishy bodies lack easily fossilized hard parts. Now a team of paleontologists has discovered that countless sea anemone fossils have been hiding in plain sight for nearly 50 years.

Simon Fraser scientists say their research on the latest fossil find near Princeton, B.C. is raising questions about how the dispersal of animals and plants occurred across the Northern Hemisphere some 50 million years ago, including whether brief intervals of global warming were at play.

Sharks acquired bioluminescence in a unique event during the Jurassic Period, after colonising the deep sea.

Molecular biology phylogenetic tree provides new insights into cartilaginous fish evolution Cartilaginous fish have changed much more in the course of evolution than previously assumed. Evidence for this thesis was provided by molecular biological data on fossil remains of Protospinax annectans , an already highly evolved shark from the late Jurassic.

Study led by the University of Bonn: Aetosaur find involves juveniles Aetosaurs had a small head and a crocodile-like body. The land dwellers were up to six meters long and widely distributed geographically. They died out about 204 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic. In Kaltental near Stuttgart, Germany, an assemblage of 24 Aetosaurus ferratus individuals, only between 20 and 82 centimeters long, was discovered in 1877.

About 250 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction killed over 80 per cent of the planet's species. In the aftermath, scientists believe that life on earth was dominated by simple species for up to 10 million years before more complex ecosystems could evolve. Now this longstanding theory is being challenged by a team of international researchers - including scientists from McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal.

Researchers gain insight into life in an ancient sea With a broken jaw on the prowl - that seems almost impossible. But researchers have discovered an approximately 245-million-year-old nothosaur fossil on which the injury had healed. The international team, with participation from the University of Bonn, examined other marine reptile bone anomalies from a site near the town of Winterswijk in the Netherlands.

Ancient fossils reveal the evolutionary history of ossification in the spine of land vertebrates A study conducted by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin revealed the evolution of ossification patterns in the backbones of four-legged vertebrates. Antoine Verrière and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the patterns of how the bones in the vertebral column formed in the ancestor to all land vertebrates based on a large dataset of modern and fossil vertebrates with the inclusion of rare new data from the 300 Ma old reptile Mesosaurus tenuidens.

Scientists discover differences in the way early herbivore dinosaurs ate their food Although most early dinosaurs were vegetarian, there were a surprising number of differences in the way that these animals tackled eating a plant-based diet, a new study reveals. Scientists used CT scans of dinosaur skulls to track the evolution of early dinosaur herbivores - reconstructing jaw muscles and measuring the animals' bite force to understand how dinosaur feeding evolved.

Coprolites, or fossil faeces from around 30,000 years ago, have been used to identify the presence of bearded vultures ( Gypaetus barbatus ) at the Palaeolithic site of Lagar Velho (Portugal). A comparison of the coprolites found in the excavations with the faeces of present-day lammergeyers has confirmed the presence of these animals in the past.