Excavation of what is believed to be remains of the first-dated mammoth discovered on the Texas Gulf Coast is in its initial phases but living up to the expectations of its researchers, a team of students and archaeologists from Texas A&M University’s Center for the Study of the First Americans.

The mammoth was found buried in a sand pit just outside Lake Jackson, Texas in the town of Clute by a backhoe operator for Vernor Material & Equipment Co. who uncovered a pair of tusks. Further

Scientists have shed new light on the impact of global environmental changes on remote tropical forests with studies that show that the rates of growth and death of trees in pristine forests across the Amazon have accelerated substantially in recent decades. The scientists also demonstrate that the tropical forests globally have warmed by half a degree in the last 20 years and warn that this is expected to increase by a further three to eight degrees by the end of the century, with dangerous implicat

During the last decade, Val Beasley of the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine has led a team wanting to know why the world’s amphibian populations have been dwindling or riddled with limb deformities.

Evidence from his and other teams points to increasing numbers of common parasites as an important cause. However, the problems facing amphibian habitats really pose a poignant example of ecosystems out of balance because of human activity, according to Beasley, a professor o

Woodpeckers carry fungus in beaks that promotes tree decay

A new study in the journal Condor by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Arkansas State University suggests that a woodpecker’s beak is a virtual petri dish of fungal spores that play a key role in the decay of dead trees, or “snags.”

The authors examined several species of woodpeckers living in ponderosa pine forests in northern California and Oregon, finding that over 60 percent of the sa

It’s not just football supporters who join together in a rousing chorus to celebrate a victory. Winning a fight also appears to put the tropical boubou, an African bird, in the mood for a song. Research published in BMC Ecology describes a rare example of a context-specific birdsong and identifies the tropical boubou as the first bird species known to sing a ’victory duet’. The birds probably sing to deter other birds from intruding into their territory. According to

500 or more dinosaurs possible yet to be discovered

A graduate student in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has combed the dinosaur fossil record from T. Rex to songbirds and has compiled the first quantitative analysis of the quality and congruence of that record.

Julia Heathcote, whose advisor is Josh Smith, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences, examined data of more than 250 di

Scientists agree that coral reefs are in an alarming global state of decline. However, determining the main cause or causes of this decline has proven a much more contentious issue. In the current edition of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology (JEMBE), Harbor Branch marine scientist Dr.Brian Lapointe and colleagues present new evidence they hope will help settle one major debate: whether pollution or overfishing is the main cause of the coral-smothering spread of seaweed on many re

Unless the wildlife trade can be controlled, Asia will lose much of its unique biodiversity, experts of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said today in Kuala Lumpur at the 7th Conference of the Parties for the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-7), convened to address the world’s priority conservation issues.

“Asia’s wildlife is being sold on a massive scale throughout the region for food, medicines and pets, and populations of many species are declining or facing local

Possession isn’t necessarily nine-tenths of the law, especially if the purchase is a wheat variety protected by the Plant Variety Protection Act. This misunderstood and often-ignored law may soon become more stringently enforced, largely due to the stepped-up use of DNA plant testing.

Gary Bomar, Texas Cooperative Extension agricultural agent for Taylor County, said the practice of “catching” or keeping some of the current crop’s production for planting the following season has lo

Some of the world’s finest rock paintings are more than three times older than previously believed, according to researchers from British and Australian universities who used the latest radio-carbon dating technology.

Previous work of the age of the rock art in South Africa’s uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, a World Heritage Site, concluded it is less than 1,000 years old. But the new study, by archaeologists from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and Australian National University in Canbe

Oil spills are a real disaster. They cause worst troubles to sea birds and animals. A risk of an accident always exists within areas of oil mining and transporting, especially, in the sea. Beginning the exploitation of oil and gas fields on the sea shelf, our country is to face inevitable ecological problems, and it would be helpful to know in advance how to solve them.

An international conference on the impact of oil industry on wild animals was held in Hamburg in October of 2003. There, re

Research shows potential warming unmatched over past 48,000 years

The new century may bring hundreds or even thousands of plant and animal extinctions to the Andes Mountains of Peru according to new research by Florida Institute of Technology Paleo-Ecologist Mark Bush. Bush’s findings, chronicled in the Feb. 6 issue of the prestigious journal Science, result from the study of the first continuous record of Andean climate change during the past 48,000 years. The Andes region of Pe

Scientific exploration to measure scat in the rainforest

Insect feces and leaf litter in the rainforest may provide important clues to better understanding global climate change, according to a group of scientists conducting research in the Panamanian rainforest on a JASON Project expedition.

Clues to determining how these factors contribute to global climate change lie in scientists investigating how plant and animal activity in the rainforest treetops, known as the canopy,

The transformation of terrestrial and coastal ecosystems by humans is well known, but only recently have the impacts of anthropogenic forces in the open ocean been recognized. In particular, intense exploitation by industrial fisheries is rapidly changing oceanic ecosystems by drastically reducing populations of many marine species. For most oceanic species we lack a historical perspective.

In an important article to shortly appear in Ecology Letters, Baum and Myers demonstrate that the ini

CSIRO Livestock Industries and animal health company, Imugene Limited, have started research work designed to develop a vaccine for chickens at risk of contracting the deadly strain of avian influenza now causing havoc in Asia.

The research team aims to deliver a trial vaccine against the virulent H5N1 strain of the disease, within a matter of months. Once developed, the vaccine could be used to safeguard Australia’s poultry industry.

CSIRO’s Dr Chris Prideaux says that ev

The planets of the solar system, including the Earth, formed about four and a half billion years ago from a swirling disk of gas and dust that was left over from the newly formed Sun. However, we do not understand, why the Earth ended up being different from other Earth-like or «terrestrial» planets and how the earliest features, like the metallic core, developed. Research at ETH Zurich by Professor Alex Halliday, to be published in this week’s edition of Nature, claims to have found some answers.