A 70 million-year-old fossil unearthed in Transylvania is a newfound species of freshwater turtle that likely survived the extinction event that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs.
More than 12,000 years ago, South America was teeming with an astonishing array of ice age beasts — giant ground sloths the size of a car, elephantine herbivores and a deerlike animal with an elongated snout.
These extinct giants are among many animals immortalized in an 8-mile-long (13-kilometer-long) frieze of rock paintings at Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon rainforest — art created by some of the earliest humans to live in the region, according to a new study.
Before the early 1900s, if it walked like a Christmas Island rat and talked like a Christmas Island rat, it probably was a Christmas Island rat. But if one of these now-extinct rats ever walks the Earth again, it will actually be a genetically modified Norway brown rat. And the rodent won’t be as similar to the Christmas Island rat as some would hope, a new study finds
Neanderthal extinction not caused by brutal wipe out
A new study looked at a well-preserved fossil of an Ichthyornis that lived about 70 million years ago. The scientists compared the brain of the ancient bird to that of modern birds. Modern birds’ brains are structurally different, which might have allowed them to survive the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs
Paignton Zoo in Devon, is the latest organisation to team up with a charity, called Nature’s Safe, which cryogenically freezes genetic samples of animals.
So far, the charity has made a ‘biobank’ of frozen samples from around 80 different species at its laboratories.
Nature’s Safe is one of Europe’s first biobanks dedicated to preserving endangered animals in this way.
Last-ditch effort under way to stop corncrake extinction in Britain
Scientists Find Hints of a Hidden Mass Extinction 30 Million Years Ago