Record El Niño threatens Great Barrier Reef with ecological shift

 

Image courtesy of fadhlanbr/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Australian Researchers are worried about the impact the strongest-known El Niño will have on the Great Barrier Reef, and whether anything can be done to avert the World Heritage Area’s demise.

With the potentially catastrophic, record-smashing El Niño still peaking in the Pacific Ocean, scientists are warning of a fundamental ecological shift that would see swathes of the Great Barrier Reef become dominated by seaweed instead of coral.

During El Niño events, warmer ocean waters pool in the eastern and central Pacific. However, the phenomenon also dramatically disrupts the usual monsoon troughs, low-pressure zones that bring cooling clouds and rain to the Great Barrier Reef region.

This is why the worst Great Barrier Reef coral-bleaching events have coincided with past El Niños, such as the devastating reef mortality that occurred in 2024.

But corrals have their own way to avert disasters. Coral reefs around the world are at risk of collapse due to rising temperatures and ocean acidification, but the natural adaptability of some species may help buy time.

Coral reefs may be able to adapt better to warmer and more acidic oceans than previously thought, raising hopes that efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and restore reefs could offer a chance to preserve these biodiverse ecosystems.

"These results offer us a potential path forward, but it depends entirely on what we decide to do about climate change and local stressors," says Chris Jury of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

God created corals as part of the animal kingdom, and they help fish and octopuses survive amidst dangers.

Sources: 

James Woodford 2026 Record El Niño threatens Great Barrier Reef with ecological shift | New Scientist 8 October

James Dinneen 2024 Here's how coral reefs might survive hotter, more acidic oceans | New Scientist 30 September 

Stunning early mammal fossil sheds light on the evolution of suckling

 

Image courtesy of April I. Neander,

Joel Kontinen

“Wood, plant fibres, hides, bone and other organic materials must have been central to daily life, but they normally disappear,” says Mariana Nabais, also at the Catalan Institute. “So when a site like Abric Romaní preserves wooden imprints and charred wooden objects, it is almost like suddenly seeing the missing half of the toolkit.”

Naoki Morimoto at Kyoto University in Japan describes the wooden objects as “remarkable”.

“The mammalian ways of swallowing and suckling are unique,” says Zhe-Xi Luo at the University of Chicago. “It is one of several biological adaptations of mammals that stand out from all other vertebrates.”

Luo and his colleagues have discovered a new genus of mammaliform, a creature that lived before the last common ancestor of the living mammalian groups – monotremes, marsupials and placentals – that would have been able to chew and suck.

It is also the earliest known example of a mammal that evolved for a semi-aquatic lifestyle. The animal has been dubbed Megacauda sungei, referencing its broad tail and palaeontologist Sun Ge.

The fossil, which evolutionist say is dated to between 163 million and 168 million years ago, was found by local farmers in the Daohugou area of Inner Mongolia, China.

“It is a chimera,” says Luo. “The back half of Megacauda is more similar to the platypus, of all mammals. But the skull and teeth are analogous to river otters.”

With an estimated weight of 1 kilogram, the creature is the largest known mammaliform from the Middle-Late Jurassic, when the planet was dominated by dinosaurs.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Stunning early mammal fossil sheds light on the evolution of suckling | New Scientist 7 October 

Fly Dubai Hijacker Was Targeting Ben Gurion

 

Fly Dubai Hijacker Was Targeting Ben Gurion airport in Israel.

Fossil mammal with reptile-like teeth changes picture of our evolution

 

Image courtesy of Paul Bowden. This shows an animal known as Dongoconodon platycauda,

Joel Kontinen

A newly discovered, semi-aquatic mammal – which would have lived alongside the dinosaurs – had the streamlined appearance of a water rodent, feet almost identical to a platypus and teeth that grew like a reptile’s. It is an ancient mammal that replace  its teeth throughout its life.

The researchers who studied the near-complete, 120-million-year-old fossil, named Dongoconodon platycauda, say its disparate anatomy offers a window into early mammal evolution. That is what the evolutionists say.

Evolution and millions of years are not the way some animals evolve.  The believe in millions of years is not a scientific one.

D. platycauda was found in 2018 in Liaoning, China. Shundong Bi at Yunnan University, China, and his colleagues studied the fossil after the collector who found it took it to the Mongolia Museum of Natural History. When it was alive, the mammal would have weighed up to 190 grams and measured about 40 centimetres long

 Source:

James Woodford 2026 Fossil mammal with reptile-like teeth changes picture of our evolution | New Scientist 2 October 

Elephants imitate each other when they produce deep rumbling sounds

 

Image courtesy of ElephantVoices

Joel Kontinen

Elephants appear to harmonise their vocal rumbles when they join together to form choruses, tuning their voices to sound more alike as the chorus unfolds.

Elephants  talk with each other with deep rumbling sounds.

“It’s sort of like what humans do in conversation, where you almost start to adopt the speaking patterns or accents of whoever you’re interacting with,” says Sara Keen at Earth Species Project. 

Elephants communicate using a rich repertoire of body language, but also a wide range of sounds. These include their iconic trumpet call, and also throatier roars. The most common call is the rumble – so low-pitched it is often undetectable by humans – which can travel up to 10 kilometres, transmitting long-distance information that can potentially include the identity of the caller and what’s happening at the time.

Joyce Poole at Elephant Voices, a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC, that promotes the study and protection of elephants, says scientists have long been intrigued by the way elephants will rumble together in choruses. Studying those complex sounds, however, has proved extremely difficult because it is hard to pick out any given rumbling elephant in the chorus – what researchers call “the cocktail party problem”.

 Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Elephants imitate each other when they produce deep rumbling sounds | New Scientist 1 October

Spectacular feathered dinosaur fossil shows bird-like adaptations

 

Image courtesy of Andrea Cau et al., Nature Communications (2026)

Joel Kontinen

The 57-centimetre-long fossil is between 100 million and 145 million years old, and was discovered by a farmer near the town of Lamadong in Liaoning, China.

Some Darwinist sat  that a bird like dinosaur was found in China,  it was was donated to a museum at Hebei GEO University in 2023, where Ji Qiang and his colleagues examined the exquisitely preserved specimen, complete with plumage, teeth, wings and articulated spine.

he researchers determined that the dinosaur was a new species, which they named Norellraptor barsboldi in honour of palaeontologists Mark Allen Norell and Rinchen Barsbold. It belongs in a group of small dinosaurs with both feathers and wings known as microraptorines.

Based on evolutionary relationships, the researchers found that around 30 per cent of anatomical changes in microraptorines also evolved in the bird lineage, but in a different order, providing evidence that the two groups evolved flight separately and for different reasons.

Analyses of N. barsboldi’s bone microstructure, its growth patterns and its evolutionary relationships show that the evolutionary sequences leading to flight adaptations in living birds and in bird-like dinosaurs were quite different, says Jacqueline  Nguyen.

This survey does not say that dinosaurs and birds are relatives.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Spectacular feathered dinosaur fossil shows bird-like adaptations | New Scientist 29 September 

Why is this monster El Niño so strong?

 

Image courtesy of CSU/CIRA & JMA/JAXA

Joel Kontinen

Some researchers are thinking why is the el Niño so powerful this autumn, although the time for it is gone.   

Many who spoke a lot about evolution are now talking about global warming.

Mind-blowing. Unprecedented. Off the charts. Jaw-dropping. Godzilla-level. Superlatives have been flying about the current El Niño climate pattern, which is already the strongest on record months before it is expected to peak – and unusually, they are coming from scientists, rather than the media. So, what has made this such an exceptional event?

This will no doubt be the subject of many studies to come, but the broad picture is clear. Two main factors have driven the formation of this record-smashing El Niño, the first of which was set in motion long before it began.

Source:

Michael Le Page 2026 Why is this monster El Niño so strong? | New Scientist 28 September