In July 1923, 100 years ago this month, scientists and explorers made an extraordinary discovery that forever changed our view of dinosaurs. An expedition to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia unearthed fossilized dinosaur eggs, in a nest, confirming that dinosaurs laid eggs like the reptiles that scientists at the time thought dinosaurs were. The find …[Read More]
A dramatic evening sky puts the frame to a photo taken during the Brazilian Antarctic expedition to James Ross Island in 2016. Brazilian palaeontologists and soil scientists together with German soil scientists spent over 40 days on the island to search for fossils and sample soils at various locations of the northern part of the …[Read More]
I am a petrographer at the University of Padova, Italy, studying the metamorphic rocks that form the deep Earth’s crust beneath our feet, and what happens when they get so hot to start to melt. I’ve spent (enjoyed I should say) more than 30 years looking at rocks with an optical microscope. This simple, cheap …[Read More]
This photograph depicts a close-up of Eocene limestones from the Sardinero Formation in Cantabria (Northern Spain). The limestone is rich with foraminifera shells, most of them from the Nummulitidae family. These organisms once lived in a very shallow sea that separated Europe from Iberia in the late Mesozoic and early Cenozoic era. Later the sea …[Read More]
We often read about Earth’s mass extinction events and how they wiped out vast numbers of animal species, leaving survivors to evolve and repopulate the planet. But it’s rarer to hear about how plants managed these catastrophes. A new study published last month by a team at University College Dublin, Ireland, in the journal Nature …[Read More]
Drawing inspiration from popular stories on our social media channels, as well as unique and quirky research news, this monthly column aims to bring you the best of the Earth and planetary sciences from around the web. Major story While the March headlines might not have been dominated by a particular story, the state of …[Read More]
