Declining temperature has been thought to explain the abandonment of Norse settlements in southern Greenland in the early 15th century CE, although limited...
Researchers from the University of Adelaide and elsewhere have sequenced and analyzed mitochondrial DNA from fossils of cave lions (Panthera spp.) and...
Dinosaurs dominated Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems globally. However, whereas a pole-to-pole geographic distribution characterized ornithischian and theropod...
One or more volcanic eruptions preceded the majority (62 of 68) of dynastic collapses in China over the past 2,000 years, according to new research led...
The end-Ordovician mass extinction, the first of the ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions occurred 445 million years ago and was characterized by the disappearance...
In a large-scale environmental DNA metagenomic study of ancient plant and mammal communities, an international team of researchers have analyzed 535 permafrost...
Nearly 63% of Afro-Arabian mammalian species went extinct approximately 30 million years ago (Oligocene epoch), after Earth’s climate shifted from swampy...
New research shows that mean annual temperatures in southeast Australia gradually declined from 27 degrees Celsius during the Middle Eocene epoch to...
Easter Island (Rapa Nui in the native language), a small volcanic island in southeastern Polynesia, has long been the focus of debate regarding the impact...
A new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, challenges claims that early humans slaughtered mammoths, mastodonts and prehistoric...
In a new study published this week in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers analyzed DNA from more than 700 sediment samples that were...
About 66 million years ago, a 10-km- (6.2-mile) wide asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. While...
Paleoclimatologists have precisely reconstructed monthly sea surface temperatures at around 50 °N latitude from fossil shells of bivalve mollusks that...
Mars had drier and wetter eras before drying up completely in the Hesperian period, about 3 billion years ago, according to an analysis of observational...
The deep ice at Camp Century in northwestern Greenland entirely melted at least once within the last million years and was covered with vegetation, including...
An international team of researchers has extracted and sequenced DNA from a 360,000-year-old petrous bone of the extinct cave bear Ursus kudarensis found...
Dr. Laura Chornogubsky, a paleontologist in the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales ‘Bernardino Rivadavia’ and CONICET, has described one new genus...
The Aral Sea basin in Central Asia and its major rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, were the center of advanced river civilizations, and a principal...