A forensic technique more often used at modern crime scenes identified blood residue from large extinct animals on spearpoints and stone tools used by people who lived in the Carolinas millennia ago.
‘De-extinction’ seems like a way to save dying or dead species - but in reality it’s an expensive and impractical waste of time.
Genetic material found in permafrost sediments from the Yukon contains rich information about ancient ecosystems.
(Julius Csotonyi/Government of Yukon)
Scientists have worked out a new way to scan beneath the ground for footprints – and it’s revealing traces of an ancient world.
Mammoths went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, but trade in their ivory is threatening their living elephant cousins.
EPA/FREDERICK VON ERICHSEN
Melting Siberian permafrost is exposing long-dead mammoths, creating a new trade in mammoth ivory.
The now-extinct giant beaver once lived from Florida to Alaska. It weighed as much as 100 kilograms, roughly the same as a small black bear.
Illustrated by Luke Dickey/Western University
Scientists studied the fossilized bones of giant beavers to understand what they ate and whether the species could keep up with environmental change.
An ice-sheet in Greenland’s Inglefield Land is hiding the Hiawatha crater.
Natural History Museum of Denmark, Cryospheric Sciences Lab, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
A burst of wet weather could have helped to kill off mammoths and other large herbivores, by transforming much of the world’s grasslands into bogs and forests and depriving megafauna of food.
Would a ban on mammoth ivory endanger or save the elephant?
Pixabay
Visiting Professor in Biomedical Ethics, Murdoch Children's Research Institute; Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law, University of Melbourne; Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University