Something Big Is Coming… Revealing John Scalzi s The Kaiju Preservation Society tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The world as we know it today is almost inconceivable without the rich and colourful landscapes created by plant life. Among them are flowering plants, or angiosperms, which are by far the most diverse and abundant group of plants, making up over 80% of all known species, including all our staple food crops.
But the world was not always like this. There was a time when plant life was almost exclusively green. Then, in the time of the dinosaurs, the world burst magnificently into bloom.
Flowers blessed our environment with chromatic vibrancy, but they also upturned food chains and elbowed out their nonflowering predecessors. Little is known about how ecosystems reacted to this sudden blossoming. But now, a tiny beetle, preserved in amber for 99 million years, has provided a valuable clue about how insects first began nourishing themselves on a colourful new platter of plants.
T
he wooly mammoth (
Mammuthus primigenius) is an iconic animal, like the saber tooth tiger or dire wolf, from a time in human history when our position at the top of the global food chain was decidedly not assured (and being something s prey was not limited to just other humans). Perhaps this is a reason that resurrection of mammoths using Jurassic Park-like technology has some currency and appeal (
but see
How to Clone a Mammoth for reasons why this may not be such a good idea). Perhaps paradoxically, the mammoth arose in Africa 5 million years ago and like its (very) distant
Creatures That May Have Lived Longer Than We Thought: The Mammoth, Part 2 mysteriousuniverse.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mysteriousuniverse.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Luxury and history in Whanganui s Bushy Park
6 Feb, 2021 09:00 PM
5 minutes to read
Tim Roxborogh and baby Riley, Whanganui. Photo / Tim Roxborogh
NZ Herald
By: Tim Roxborogh
There s a certain no-nonsense charm to the unimaginative bluntness of a name like Bushy Park . If the park is bushy, why not name it Bushy Park? Exactly! In a nation where the North and South Islands are handily called the North Island and the South Island, it makes sense that at least somewhere in Aotearoa there d be a tract of bush bestowed as being Bushy Park . And let it be known, Whanganui s Bushy Park is indeed, very, very bushy.