News by Subject Earth Science

About 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth froze. The seas began to ice over at the Earth's poles, and new species evolved with the new temperatures. The cause of this ice age was a mystery, until now: a new study in Science Advances argues that the ice age was caused by global cooling, triggered by extra dust in the atmosphere from a giant asteroid collision in outer space.

In just five generations, an altered microbiome can lead to genome-wide evolution in fruit flies, according to new research led researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. 'The fact that we can see this effect in experiments done over such a short time scale suggests that the magnitude of the fitness effects the microbes have is incredible,' says Schmidt.

Near an old mining town in Central Europe, known for its picturesque turquoise-blue quarry water, lay Rudapithecus. For 10 million years, the fossilized ape waited in Rudabánya, Hungary, to add its story to the origins of how humans evolved. What Rudabánya yielded was a pelvis -- among the most informative bones of a skeleton, but one that is rarely preserved.

The microbiome of terrestrial organisms, regardless of their kinship relationships, differs significantly from those of aquatic organisms. Organisms living on land have a lower diversity of microorganisms contained in their microbiome.

The ancestor of some of the largest flying birds ever has been found in Waipara, New Zealand.

Published today in GigaScience is an article presenting 19 high-coverage penguin genome sequences. Adding this to the two previously published penguin genomes, there are now genome sequences available for all living penguin species. Here, the Penguin Genome Consortium, made up of researchers from 10 countries, has produced an unparalleled amount of information that covers an entire biological order. Research from evolution, the impact of human activities impact, and environmental changes, will benefit from this work.

We usually think of a species as being reproductively isolated -- that is, not mating with other species in the wild. Occasionally, however, closely related species do interbreed. New research documents the existence of a previously undiscovered hybrid zone along the coasts of California and Oregon where two related bird hummingbirds are blurring species boundaries, and researchers hope that studying cases such as this one could improve their understanding of how biodiversity is created and maintained.

Australian researchers looking for a genetic lifeline to endangered hog deer species endemic to Pakistan, northern India and mainland southeast Asia have found widespread hybridisation of the species in Victoria.

Early rice growers unwittingly gave barnyard grass a big hand, helping to give root to a rice imitator that is now considered one of the world's worst agricultural weeds. The new research from biologist Kenneth Olsen in Arts & Sciences is published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution.