ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

Researchers have developed a methodology for quantifying landscape changes on barrier islands and, in doing so, have found the storms that can devastate human infrastructure also create opportunities for coastal wildlife to thrive.

Why did some ancient Khmer and Mesoamerican cities collapse between 900-1500CE, while their rural surrounds continued to prosper? Intentional adaptation to climate changed conditions may be the answer, suggests a new study.

Geologists completed research characterizing the complex geological evolution of the Orphan Basin, offshore Newfoundland and Labrador, using an extensive database of newly available, modern 2D and 3D broadband seismic reflection data. These data allow geologists to visualize and understand the subsurface.

In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years. At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho.

Using a new mechanistic model of evolution on Earth, researchers can now better explain why the rainforests of Africa are home to fewer species than the tropical forests of South America and Southeast Asia. The key to high species diversity lies in how dynamically the continents have evolved over time.

A new special edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showcases multidisciplinary approaches to exploring human impacts on tropical forests and their associated Earth systems.

The rise of dinosaurs coincided with environmental changes driven by major volcanic eruptions over 230 million years ago, a new study reveals.

The missing link isn't a not-yet-discovered fossil, after all. It's a tiny, self-replicating globule called a coacervate droplet, developed by researchers to represent the evolution of chemistry into biology.

A 25-million-year-old eagle fossil found in South Australia adds to the long evolutionary history of raptors in Australia.