When you imagine the Cretaceous Period (145-66 million years ago), dinosaurs probably come to mind. This is certainly true for the famed Wapiti Formation of western Canada, which is host to a number of Cretaceous beasts from ~70 million years ago, including tyrannosaurids, hadrosaurs, and ceratopsians as well as their trackways, but also birds, fish, and early mammals.
Clitellates (Clitellata: Annelida) are small, aquatic, segmented worms, including leeches and earthworms, that occupy many habitats from land, to freshwater, to oceans.…
The bones of terrestrial vertebrates are often found in riverine sediments. However, this doesn’t always mean they were living nearby. The sheer nature of fluvial sediments means there is often a spectrum of distances travelled from origin to final deposition, especially when it comes to the interaction of bones with fluid flow.…
Mass extinctions, though destructive to ecosystems, provide unique opportunities for evolution to take an unexpected direction as a result of changes to available habitats and food resources.…
Pterygotids (Eurypterida; Pterygotidae), known more commonly as ancient sea scorpions, were large apex predators of the Silurian-Devonian marine realm, and included some of the largest arthropods in Earth’s history, with some species reaching up to 2.5 meters in length. They are the only family of eurypterids to be found globally in marine deposits owing to their domination of the Mid-Palaeozoic seas.
Fifty years ago, palaeontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould published one of the most provocative ideas in evolutionary science: punctuated equilibria. In their 1972 paper, they argued that species don’t always evolve through slow, steady change. Instead, the fossil record shows long periods of stasis, times when species remain remarkably stable, interrupted by brief bursts of evolutionary innovation linked to the origin of new species.
When we picture mosasaurs, the giant marine reptiles that ruled the oceans during the Late Cretaceous, we often imagine long, snake-like monsters propelling through the water. But what did their tails really look like? The fossil record rarely preserves the soft tissues from which fins and muscles are constructed, leaving paleontologists with only bones to infer what these propulsive features may have looked like.
The Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME) was the second largest mass extinction of the ‘Big Five’ extinctions in Earth’s history, responsible for the loss of approximately 85% of marine species. Following an important diversification in the middle Ordovician, crinoids experienced substantial loss during the LOME, and species saw a significant decrease in body size, known in paleontology as the ‘Lilliput Effect’.
The first geographically widespread animals in geological history appear in the Ediacaran period, in the Avalon assemblage, between 574 and 560 million years ago. The first animal communities were host to strange and unfamiliar organisms known as rangeomorphs and arboreomorphs, as well as more recognisable cnidarians (invertebrates like sea anemone and jellyfish).
Pterygotids, known more commonly as ancient sea scorpions, were large apex predators of the Silurian-Devonian marine world. Their delicate skeletons, however, leave many questions about their morphology and ecology.…
A new study of from the Middle Ordovician of Estonia reveals some of the earliest evidence for parasitism in the fossil record.…
From tenacious trilobites, to scavenging shrimp, for the last 500 million years of Earth’s history, marine arthropods have scuttled around the sea floor, forming a dominant part of the ocean’s ecosystem.…
Net winged beetles (Lycidae) are cosmopolitan pollinators, known for their intricate vein-like wing patterns and eye-catching colours, but behind these diverse delicate beetles lies an evolutionary enigma.…
https://doi.org/10.1017/pab.2024.33 Since the 1980s Precambrian palaeontologists believed that early eukaryotes (Domain: Eukarya, microorganisms with a membrane bound nucleus) underwent a dramatic diversification in the Tonian Period (1000-720Ma).…
https://doi.org/10.1017/pab.2025.4 From its revolutionary beginnings in 1975, and an aim to marry biology and palaeontology to answer key evolutionary questions, Paleobiology continues to put innovative fossil and evolution research at its forefront.…
Q&A with Editor-in-Chief of the Precision Medicine Journal, Dame Anna Dominiczak, for International day of Women and Girls in Science
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
Even though findings from genetics and other sciences unequivocally refute biological conceptions of race, this erroneous viewpoint remains widespread among the general public.…
How long will humankind survive? Besides the fact that we have been able to eliminate ourselves with nuclear weapons for decades, even without a third world war, the challenge to take care of the resources of our planet remains; we need to use them in a way that our children and their children can have a place on Earth as well. In this blog post Andreas Losch discusses his recent review article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
Some disability-related names have dropped out of usage, because they are now considered to be offensive due to their origins. Down Syndrome (Trisomy 21) is one example.…
Why understanding contemporary youth militancy demands history Al-Shabaab fighters patrolling Afgooye-Mogadishu road (2025) In civil war-era Somalia in the early 1990s, global media headlines about ‘stoned teenagers’ cruising Mogadishu on jeeps mounted with machine guns became synonymous with the construction of Somalia as a ‘chaotic African country’ in which one could be killed for nothing more than ‘the clothes on your back’ (New York Times, 1992).…
The March article of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International is the first blog of the series. The blog is written by Dr Dami Ajayi, Specialty Doctor, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Trainee/Blog Editor, BJPsych International.…
How long will humankind survive? Besides the fact that we have been able to eliminate ourselves with nuclear weapons for decades, even without a third world war, the challenge to take care of the resources of our planet remains; we need to use them in a way that our children and their children can have a place on Earth as well. In this blog post Andreas Losch discusses his recent review article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
It is an article of faith among ordinary Filipinos that American troops will die with Filipino troops defending Philippine claims to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea (SCS).…
Q&A with Editor-in-Chief of the Precision Medicine Journal, Dame Anna Dominiczak, for International day of Women and Girls in Science
More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.
This is the first post in our new series: “Conversations with Authors.” For our inaugural post, we asked Dr. Vesla Weaver to meet (virtually) with Dr.…
The March article of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International is the first blog of the series. The blog is written by Dr Dami Ajayi, Specialty Doctor, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Trainee/Blog Editor, BJPsych International.…
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
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