Hot off the press

Richelle Butcher, Massey University; Britta Denise Hardesty, CSIRO, and Lauren Roman, CSIRO Plastic in the ocean can be deadly for marine wildlife and seabirds around the globe, but our latest study shows single-use plastics are a bigger threat to endangered albatrosses in the southern hemisphere than we previously thought. You may have heard of the Great Pacific … Read More

Kieren Mitchell; Alice Mouton, Université de Liège; Angela Perri, Durham University, and Laurent Frantz, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Thanks to the hit television series Game of Thrones, the dire wolf has gained a near-mythical status. But it was a real animal that roamed the Americas for at least 250,000 years, until it became extinct towards the end of the … Read More

Peter S. Ross, University of British Columbia The Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern communities that rely heavily on seafood and marine … Read More

Lennart van Maldegem, Australian National University; Benjamin Nettersheim, Max Planck Institute; Christian Hallmann, Max Planck Institute; Ilya Bobrovskiy, California Institute of Technology, and Jochen Brocks, Australian National University Sponges are the simplest of animals, and they may stand at the root of all complex animal life on Earth, including us humans. Scientists study the evolution of the earliest sponges, hundreds … Read More

Eric Galbraith, McGill University and Kim Scherrer, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona People in wealthy, industrialized countries are used to finding their supermarket shelves fully stocked. Yet for a brief period early in the COVID-19 pandemic, some of those shelves emptied out, as panic drove shoppers to stockpile and supply chains were interrupted. For many, this came as a reminder that … Read More

James Patrick Rule, Monash University; Erich Fitzgerald, Museums Victoria; Felix Georg Marx, Te Papa Tongarewa, and Justin W. Adams, Monash University A fossil discovery in New Zealand has revealed a new species of monk seal that once called Australasia home. We introduce the three million-year-old seal, Eomonachus belegaerensis, in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal … Read More