ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

A computer modeling study shows how the emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide have increased from soils over the last century. The newly published research found the expansion of land devoted to agriculture since 1900 and intensive fertilizer inputs have predominantly driven an overall increase in nitrous oxide emissions from U.S. soils.

A new description of two well-preserved ancient fossil plant specimens in Washington state is prompting paleobotanists to rethink how plants might have been dispersed during the Late Cretaceous, between 66 and 100 million years ago.

To learn how lichens might be able to adapt to climate change, researchers examined the evolutionary history of the algae that's a part of 7,000 kinds of lichens. By studying genetic relationships between algae and building a giant family tree to show how different algae are elated to each other and how quickly they evolve, the scientists found that this algae can take hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to the changes in temperature that we expect to see over the course of this century. That means that these lichens are in dire trouble when it comes to climate change.