Blurs

Sometimes a fossil is more than the remains of a dead animal. Sometimes it is a geographical mystery.  A creature is discovered thousands of miles from where scientists expected it to be. A tropical species turns up in what was once a surprisingly cold region. A land animal appears on an island separated from the mainland by an ocean. A familiar species is found in rocks that suggest an environment completely unlike the one its living relatives inhabit. These discoveries can force scientists to reconsider ancient geography, climate and migration. But they also raise a more intriguing question: How many times have we underestimated the ability of prehistoric animals to cross the planet? The world they inhabited wasn't the world we know today. Continents moved. Seas appeared and disappeared. Land bridges formed and vanished. Ice sheets expanded. Deserts became grasslands, and forests spread across regions that are now frozen or barren. Coastlines also migrated by hundreds of kilometr...

Could some of our ancestors have spent far more of the Ice Age beneath the surface than we realise? When we imagine humans during the Ice Age, we tend to picture hunters crossing frozen landscapes, wrapped in animal skins, tracking mammoths and reindeer across windswept plains. It's an image that has become almost synonymous with prehistoric humanity. But there is another possibility. When conditions became brutally cold, perhaps the smartest place to be wasn't out on the frozen landscape at all. Perhaps it was underground. Humans have been using caves and rock shelters for hundreds of thousands of years. We know that Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens repeatedly occupied caves, sometimes during extraordinarily cold climatic periods. But this raises a more intriguing question: Did some human groups retreat into underground environments for much longer periods during the most severe phases of the Ice Age? The answer isn't as straightforward as it might first appear. W...

Antarctica appears to be one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. A vast continent buried beneath an ice sheet several kilometres thick, with temperatures capable of falling far below freezing and enormous regions untouched by direct sunlight. Yet beneath all that ice lies something extraordinary. Water. Not simply isolated pockets of melted ice, but an interconnected environment containing hundreds of known subglacial lakes, channels and rivers. Some of these hidden bodies of water have been sealed beneath the Antarctic ice for extraordinarily long periods. And scientists are beginning to discover that the world beneath Antarctica may be far more dynamic—and potentially far more biologically interesting—than previously imagined. Antarctica's Hidden Landscape When we picture Antarctica, we usually imagine a frozen continent. But the surface of the ice tells only part of the story. Beneath it lies a complex landscape of mountains, valleys, canyons, basins and ancient geological...

Earth looks like a world overflowing with water. Around 71% of its surface is covered by oceans, while enormous quantities of water are locked away in glaciers, groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil and the atmosphere. Yet scientists have long faced a fascinating question: How much water did the young Earth actually contain—and where did it all go? The answer may involve violent impacts, a changing atmosphere, the loss of ancient oceans and enormous quantities of water hidden deep beneath our feet. And some of Earth's water may be much closer to the planet's interior than we ever imagined. A Wet Planet With a Dry Interior When viewed from space, Earth appears unmistakably blue. But compared with the size of the planet, the amount of water at the surface is surprisingly small. The oceans contain roughly 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water. That sounds almost incomprehensibly large, yet if all of Earth's water were gathered into a single sphere, the resulting ball would be only ...