Studying climate change-induced mass extinctions in the deep geological past allows researchers to explore the impact of environmental crises on organismal evolution. One principal example is the Permian-Triassic climatic crises, a series of climatic shifts driven by global warming that occurred between the Middle Permian (265 million years ago) and Middle Triassic (230 million years ago). These climatic shifts caused two of the largest mass extinctions in the history of life at the end of the Permian, the first at 261myo and the other at 252myo, eliminating 86% of all animal species...
Lungs are essential to many vertebrates including humans. However, four living amphibian clades have independently eliminated pulmonary respiration and lack lungs, breathing primarily through their wet skin. Little is known of the developmental basis of lung loss in these clades.
In a new study in Science Advances researchers in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard...
Through careful study of exceptional specimens, graduate student Sarah Losso and faculty-curator Javier Ortega-Hernández show that some trilobites mated very much like extant horseshoe crabs thanks to their highly modified clasper-like limbs.
Congratulations to MCZ Faculty-Curator of Ornithology, Scott V. Edwards, elected as a member of the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund, Sweden. The award is in honor of Professor Edwards scientific achievements and collaboration with University of Lund researchers.
Ortega-Hernández Lab members, and colleague, describe the first ever opabiniid, a crown jewel of the Cambrian explosion from the Wheeler Formation, Utah.
