For millions of years, giant animals or megafauna, like giant kangaroos in Australia, roamed the lands that are now Australia and New Guinea. Many were like much larger versions of modern animals. There was a four-meter goanna called Megalania (Varanus priscus), for example, which likely ambushed its prey. This beast disappeared around 40,000 years ago, ...
Giant creatures are usually associated with dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, or mystical beasts. But if you go back though the human lineage, you’ll find a very distant relative that stood three meters tall and weighed around 250 kilograms. This was Gigantopithecus blacki, the mightiest of all the apes and one of the biggest unresolved mysteries in ...
Australia is famous for its diverse and unique marsupials and infamous for its world-leading rate of mammal extinctions. In our latest research, we have added new names to the list of Australian marsupials — and at the same time, new entries to the grim catalogue of species driven to extinction since European colonisation. Our new ...
Many of the giant marsupials and birds that roamed ancient Australia vanished 40,000 years ago. While the duration and drivers of these extinctions remain debated, fossils clearly show the continent lost a host of creatures that would have dwarfed humans. These giant creatures included short-faced kangaroos, diprotodons, “thunderbirds,” giant goannas, and giant skinks. Our study ...
At the icy northern tip of Greenland, far into the Artic Circle, a deep bed of sediment beneath the mouth of a fjord has lain frozen and undisturbed for 2 million years. Known as the Kap København Formation, this relic of a vanished world dates to a period when Earth was much warmer than it ...
The coral reefs in the western Indian Ocean in the African coastline are nearing extinction. The finding has made marine wildlife experts and researchers anxious. A new study hints that menaces like overfishing and rising sea temperature will lead to the demise of coral reefs in Africa. The coral reefs stretch from Africa’s eastern coast ...
A colony of the rare orchid species known as small-flowered tongue orchids was found atop a bank roof in London. It is a wonderful feeling for nature lovers and horticulturists to come across plant specimens that are on the verge of extinction. Sometimes, they get amazed upon finding such rare plant types thriving in uninhabited ...
Djabugay is the language of the people with the same name. Their language is now almost extinct. The federal nation of Australia was established in 1901, about 120 years ago. Yet, this is a very old continent with an immensely long history of human settlement, much older than that of Europe and the Americas. The ...
Chinese pangolins are nocturnal mammals mostly distributed in the southern part of the Chinese mainland and throughout most of Taiwan. They are also found in northern India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Once common in China, their population has dropped sharply since the late 20th century due to poaching and trafficking. Now, they are on the ...
Chinese paddlefish, which reached up to 23 feet in length, have become extinct according to a recent paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. The species survived on Earth for almost 200 million years and was driven to extinction due to human activity. An extinct species Chinese paddlefish were native to the ...
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