An international expedition including University of Sydney researchers has pieced together the clearest picture yet of how the Great Barrier Reef responded to dramatic environmental change over the past 30,000 years. Multiple studies since the expedition more than 10 years ago traced the reef’s retreat, regrowth and repeated collapse from the last ice age to the dawn of the modern reef.

Atmospheric rivers are responsible for transporting moisture and play an important role in snowfall over the ice sheet. However, conventional two-dimensional detection methods have been unsuccessful at capturing these systems accurately. Now, researchers have developed a new 3D algorithm for the detection of atmospheric rivers. Their findings reveal that atmospheric rivers form vertically structured moisture plumes that exert strong control over Antarctic precipitation and its long-term variability.

Gram, Denmark — An associated set of gigantic vertebrae belonging to the iconic extinct Megalodon or megatooth shark that had been missing in action since the 1980s was discovered, providing new information about the shark’s lifestyle. Two Museum of Southern Jutland staff, Mette Elstrup and Trine Sørensen, and a researcher at Aarhus University, Henrik Lauridsen, teamed up with a scientist in the United States and another in Australia and took a renewed look at a once-lost vertebral specimen of Otodus megalodon, the fossil shark that lived nearly worldwide about 15 to 3.6 million years ago.  The new study appears in the international journal Palaeontologia Electronica.

A new study led by the University of Plymouth has used more than six decades of data to show that plankton abundance is declining across vast swathes of the North East Atlantic – a region covering the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Norway, and the entirety of the North Sea.

Traces or perforations caused by living organisms after the animal’s death can be found on various dinosaur bone remains. These perforations, known as bioerosion structures, provide information that helps us understand the relationships between living organisms in the past, reconstruct palaeoecosystems and improve our understanding of the fossilization process. Now, a study published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews has identified this type of perforation in bones and, for the first time, also in pieces of dermal armour (osteoderms) from titanosaurs at the Lo Hueco site (Cuenca,Spain), dating from the Late Cretaceous.

CT scans of ancient crocodile brains reveal clues to 100 million years of evolution. New study uses digital reconstructions of living and extinct crocodylians to untangle the evolutionary history of long-snouted crocodiles. By digitally reconstructing the internal anatomy of fossil skulls, the researchers identified a series of morphological differences in the braincase and associated sensory structures among long-snouted crocodiles from different geological periods. The findings demonstrate the growing importance of implementing non-destructive imaging techniques in palaeontology.