The genomes of living animals are littered with DNA from long-gone relatives, providing a lens on evolution, past extinctions, and perhaps even solutions to agricultural problems.
Today’s extinction rates are sky-high. But scientists debate if that’s sufficient evidence to conclude that Earth is undergoing a mass extinction event—or whether that’s even a helpful designation.
More than two-thirds of mammals in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula went extinct during the Eocene-Oligocene transition some 30 million years ago, a study finds.
From fish harvests to cottonwood forests, organisms display evidence that species change can occur on timescales that can influence ecological processes.
Researchers are trying to recreate an extinct species of the lumbering reptiles by breeding closely related species that contain traces of the lost lineage’s DNA.
A. Marmaduke Kilpatrick | Dec 1, 2014 | 10+ min read
Bat populations ravaged; hundreds of amphibian species driven to extinction; diverse groups of birds threatened. Taking risks will be necessary to control deadly wildlife pathogens.