ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

Hundreds of millions of years ago, microbes and plants might have given insects an evolutionary advantage by passing genes to them through horizontal gene transfer. Researchers now report that more than 1,400 genes across 218 insect species, including butterflies and moths, originated from bacteria, viruses, fungi, and plants. The study argues that these genes might have been essential for insect evolution by allowing them to develop beneficial traits in mating behavior, nutrition, growth, and adaptation to environmental changes.

The world's governments are presently negotiating a Global Biodiversity Framework, containing goals and targets for saving nature, which is due to be adopted at the end of 2022. Conservation experts explored how the suggested targets in the Framework, could contribute to reducing extinction risk of threatened vertebrates, invertebrates and plants. Their findings show that while targets to expand protected areas or reduce pollution will benefit many species, 57% would still need targeted recovery actions.

Some copepods, diminutive crustaceans with an outsized place in the aquatic food web, can evolve fast enough to survive in the face of rapid climate change, according to new research that addresses a longstanding question in the field of genetics.

New research reveals that, rather than being influenced only by environmental conditions, deep subsurface microbial communities can transform because of geological movements. The findings advance our understanding of subsurface microorganisms, which comprise up to half of all living material on the planet.

For the first time, researchers successfully sequenced the genome of ancient human fossils from the Late Pleistocene in southern China. The data suggests that the mysterious hominin belonged to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that might have contributed to the origin of Native Americans.

The world's coastal glaciers are melting faster than ever. New research gives scientists a way to unravel the causes of glacial retreat, and in turn, reveal how much can be attributed to human-caused climate change. Attributing the human role for coastal glaciers -- which melt directly into the sea -- could pave the way to better predictions about sea level rise.

The evolution of the brain and nervous system in animals has been wound back more than 400 million years, thanks to the examination of fossil remains of ancient lungfish providing a missing link in the emergence of land-living, four-legged animals on Earth. Researchers have compared detailed 3D models of cranial endocasts from six Paleozoic lungfish fossils to the brain spaces of the surviving sister group of land vertebrates, to better understand brain evolution of lungfishes.

By analyzing noble gas isotope data, a scientist determined that the ancient plume mantle (the deep part) had a water concentration that was a factor of 4 to 250 times lower when compared with the water concentration of the upper mantle.