Countries have been trying to get a global agreement to halt nature decline back on track.

As today’s oceans lose oxygen, Alaskan rocks trace a similar decline that began millions of years before the end-Triassic mass extinction. Dinosaurs survived the end-Triassic mass extinction 201 million years ago, but roughly 60 percent of Earth’s species did not. New evidence from Virginia Tech geologists suggests that the crisis in the oceans began about 8 million years earlier, when oxygen levels in shallow waters started to decline. Scientists have long linked the extinction to enormous volcanic eruptions that tore apart landmasses, warmed the planet, and triggered widespread environmental changes. As temperatures rise, rocks break down faster, releasing nutrients that contribute to increasing ocean acidity. Warmer seawater also holds less dissolved oxygen, creating conditions that can lead to oxygen-depleted dead zones where marine organisms struggle to survive. The combination of rising acidity and falling oxygen is “kind of like a one-two punch,” said geochemist Ben Gill. “It wouldn’t have been a very happy place to be.” Although scientists had previously found evidence of widespread marine oxygen loss around the end-Triassic extinction, much of it came from a limited geographic area. Researchers still lacked a clear understanding of when the decline began and how extensively it affected the oceans. Recent studies...

New AI-powered research questions whether a majority of Earth’s mass extinctions were as abrupt as previously believed.

Palaeontologists identify extinctions by looking at the presence or absence of species over million-year intervals. We know the fossil record is incomplete, but if a species is found widely during one million-year period and isn’t found in younger rocks, it’s reasonable to assume it went extinct around then. If enough species vanish in the same block, you've got yourself a mass extinction. A million years, however, is a very long time. Most of the species lost during the Cretaceous mass extinction, also known as the K-Pg event, are assumed to have died out in under a year or two. Other mass extinctions are thought to have played out over spans of 100,000 years or less, but it takes a lot of effort to produce a timeline with a higher resolution than a million years. Resolving the past OneStrata makes doing so much easier. Professor Shuzhong Shen at Nanjing University in China and co-authors had it process data on fossils found in 31,000 stratigraphic sections around the world and produce probabilistic estimates of when those fossils were deposited. Applying this to 2.8 million fossils, the authors estimated the timing of 110,000 species extinctions in blocks of just 1,000 years. Looked at...

New research suggests that the ancestors of alligators and crocodiles stayed loyal to a warm climate through mass extinctions and hothouse worlds, a loyalty that may have helped them survive the...

Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT are trained to recognize patterns in written texts, helping them to choose a statistically probable word to complete a sentence. Palaeontologists have now trained a similar model on fossil records instead of words, then used it to reconstruct a timeline of changes in Earth’s biodiversity over hundreds of millions of years in unprecedented detail. This big-data approach to interpreting the rock record — the field known as stratigraphy — could spur a rethink of major upheavals in the history of life, the model’s developers say. For instance, the model suggests that three of the “Big Five” mass-extinction events were gradual declines in biodiversity, rather than the sudden cataclysms described by other reconstructions. Supercomputer scours fossil record for Earth’s hidden extinctions The model is “a real revolution for studying stratigraphy and past diversity change”, says Shuzhong Shen, a palaeontologist at Nanjing University in China, who presented the research at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado, on 12 October. Other researchers say that although the model’s reconstruction — called OneStrata — seems to be the most detailed global record so far, scientists already have high-resolution reconstructions of changes in...

Human activity is driving plants and animals to extinction at an unprecedented rate. As countries meet in Armenia to discuss ways to reverse nature loss, DW reveals how declining biodiversity is alrea...

From the tiniest microbes in the human gut to giant whales in the ocean, biodiversity is the sum of all life on the planet. It's another word for nature. And because nature is like a team, every player has a job. When various species from trees to animals work together, they regulate weather, maintain soil health, purify water and support food production. These benefits are known as ecosystem services and they underpin human wellbeing. "It is really an abstract concept, but we experience it absolutely every day," said Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at conservation group WWF "And we almost never think about it when nature is functioning." But as it declines, she and other scientists are calling on the world to really think about it. Because biodiversity is struggling as humans push ecosystems to the brink through intensive farming, burning fossil fuels,and pollution from sources like plastic and chemicals. Over the past 52 years, monitored vertebrate populations have collapsed by an average of 73%, while freshwater ecosystems are faring worst with a drop of 85%, according to WWF's recent Living Planet report. It tallies with other studies that show a million animal and plant species face extinction unless humanity reduces...

Vaquitas are on the brink of extinction. WWF is working to ban gillnets and protect their habitat in Mexico’s Gulf of California.

An ancient crater buried underneath the Oklahoma town of Ames has been discovered to be almost 100 million years younger than thought, consequently connecting it to one of the big five mass extinction events in Earth's history. The crater, which spans about 10 miles (16 kilometers) in diameter, is buried under 9,000 feet (2.7 kilometers) of sedimentary rock and was not discovered until seismic readings revealed it in 1991. Initial estimates of the crater's age came from the discovery of the tooth in a rock found within the impact site. It was identified as belonging to an ancient eel-like creature called a conodont, which existed during the middle of a geological period known as the Ordovician, in a rock found within the impact site. This period was marked by a dramatic bombardment of asteroids known as the Ordovician Meteor Event 467.5 million years ago, which left nearly two-dozen craters spread around the world, all within 30 degrees of the equator. This equatorial pattern suggests there may have been a ring of material from a broken-up asteroid encircling the Earth's equator. However, a team led by Elizabeth Catlos of the University of Texas at Austin has arrived at a different conclusion,...

The fossil record contains the unambiguous evidence of five separate occasions on which most of the species alive at the time died, in geological terms, very

The fossil record contains the unambiguous evidence of five separate occasions on which most of the species alive at the time died, in geological terms, very