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El Nino is famously a creature of the calendar. It flares roughly every two to seven years, tips global weather off its usual paths for a season or two, and fades. Ask what it does to the world's…
A thunderclap does two things at once. It rolls across the sky, and it pushes down. Part of that acoustic energy hits the ground and keeps going, converting into seismic waves that ripple through the…
Picture a kangaroo the weight of the biggest reds alive today, but built wrong for the part: too stocky, too muscular, and by most reckoning barely able to hop. Protemnodon tumbuna seems to have…
Stand anywhere on the Tibetan Plateau and the word that comes to mind is flat: a cold, thin-aired tableland averaging more than 4,500 metres above sea level, earning its nickname as the Roof of the…
Every asteroid carries a birth certificate, if you know where to look for it. It is written not in shape or size but in isotopes, the slightly different weights of the same chemical element, mixed in…
Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, the oceans nearly emptied. The Permian-Triassic extinction (geologists call it the Great Dying, and the name is not hyperbole) erased something like 96…
Spider fangs do not look like they should have a fossil record. They are delicate, hollow and mostly made of the kind of soft tissue that rots long before it can turn to stone. So the question of…
The evidence is a single lower jaw. It is robust, set with unusually large canine and premolar teeth and molars whose chewing surfaces are rounded and heavily textured, the kind of teeth suited to a…
A fire needs three things: heat, oxygen and fuel. Cut off any one and it dies. What made the end-Triassic so catastrophic, a new study argues, is that the landscape kept regrowing its own fuel, fast…
Walk any tide line today and you will find the arrangement everywhere: a hermit crab in a borrowed shell, worms and sponges crusting the inside of an abandoned whelk, a whole small economy built…
The find that matters here was not made in the field. It was made at a table, with a drawer of bones on it, in a collection nobody had worked through properly since the material came out of the…
Give the same aerial imagery to two dozen geologists, ask them all to trace the active faults, and you might expect the answers to converge, especially the ones from decades-hardened professionals.…