News by Subject Earth Science

A new study, led by scientists at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China, including University of Bristol Ph.D. student Zhang Hanwen, examined the feeding habits of ancient elephant relatives that inhabited Central Asia some 17 million years ago.

ANU archaeologist Dr. Catherine Frieman unearths an intact 4,000-year-old human cremation in clay pottery urn on a Cornish site she discovered by accident.

What happens when pests resist all forms of herbicides and pesticides? To slow the evolutionary progression of weeds and insect pests gaining resistance to herbicides and pesticides, policymakers should provide resources for large-scale, landscape-level studies of a number of promising but untested approaches for slowing pest evolution.

An international research team has developed a simple method for using a network of autonomous time-lapse cameras to track the breeding and population dynamics of Antarctic penguins, providing a new, low-cost window into the health and productivity of the Antarctic ecosystem.

Information about the organization and evolution of plastomes is crucial to improve crop plants and to resolve the phylogeny of photosynthetic organisms. In a recent study researchers of the Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, sequenced the plastid genome of a weed called bittersweet (Solanum dulcamara).

Humans are known to have one functioning and three non-functioning genes that make an enzyme that digests the hard exoskeletons of insects, which are made of chitin. A new UC Berkeley study shows that nearly all placental mammals have one of five different chitinase genes, though not all are functioning and some fragmentary. This suggests that the common ancestor of all placental mammals, living with dinosaurs until 66 million years ago, was an insect eater.

Green blood is one of the most unusual characteristics in the animal kingdom, but it's the hallmark of a group of lizards in New Guinea. The muscles, bones and tongues of these lizards appear bright, lime-green due to high levels of biliverdin, or a green bile pigment, which is toxic and causes jaundice. Surprisingly, these lizards remain healthy with levels of green bile that are 40 times higher than the lethal concentration in humans.