Soft, squishy, ancient spiders are hard to investigate – they don’t fossilise as easily as bones or exoskeletons. So you can imagine how excited researchers were to find 10 brand new spider fossils in a relatively unexplored area called the Jinju Formation. The Jinju Formation is a geological area of South Korea from the Mesozoic era,

It’s been snowing in Siberia. But instead of waking to a white winter wonderland, residents in Russia’s coal basin are living through a dark, industrial nightmare. Three separate cities within the coal-mining region of Kemerovo in southwest Siberia have been blanketed in a thick, black deluge of toxic snow, polluted by ever-present coal dust that

Airplanes often receive a speed increase from air currents high in the skies, but very few get an insane boost like this: helped by a tailwind of more than 322 km (200 miles) per hour, a Boeing 787-9 jet reached a ground speed of 1,289 km (801 miles) per hour on Monday night. The top

By about the time our great-grandchildren have children of their own, we humans will likely have broken a climate record that has stood unchallenged for 56 million years. New research has found that humans are pumping nearly 10 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than what was emitted during Earth’s last major warming event, called

Years ago, the small, ratlike rodents could be seen scurrying across the sand and coral rubble on the Australian island of Bramble Cay. Fishermen would sometimes see them while visiting the island, which is dotted with a few grass clumps, shorebirds and nesting sea turtles in the Great Barrier Reef. As mackerel fisherman Egon Stewart

Sixty-six million years ago, something changed the world catastrophically. Around 75 percent of the world’s plant and animal species died, wiping out the dinosaurs. This marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and started a new dawn on Earth – the Cenozoic, the age of mammals. But we don’t entirely know what caused it. Fossil

There are an awful lot of insects. It’s hard to say exactly how many because 80 percent haven’t yet been described by taxonomists, but there are probably about 5.5 million species. Put that number together with other kinds of animals with exoskeletons and jointed legs, known collectively as arthropods – this includes mites, spiders and

An ice shelf in Antarctica is about to give birth to a baby. This baby is a giant, spawned by growing cracks in the Brunt Ice Shelf. It’s not clear what this’ll mean to the scientific infrastructure in the area, and to the human presence, which were both established in the 1950s. The Brunt Ice

Diving to the bottom of the ocean is arguably harder than rocketing into space. Hundreds of astronauts have left Earth, but you can count the people who’ve visited the very bottom of the ocean on one hand: James Cameron, Jacques Piccard, and Don Walsh. Because of that, we don’t know much about what goes on

Around 252 million years ago, Earth experienced catastrophic devastation – an extinction event so severe that it wiped out almost all of the life on Earth. Up to 70 percent of all land vertebrate species were killed off, and a massive 96 percent of all marine species, including the famous trilobite that had previously survived