Brachiopods are small, shelled, filter feeding ocean dwellers that are extremely abundant and well preserved in the fossil record. These qualities make them ideal for studying disturbances in the environment, including mass extinction events – in the past. At https://phys.org/news/2021-12-factors-mass-extinction-fossil-climate.html … the subject is the Devonian mass extinction event – and an attempt to study how life forms coped with it. those that went extinct as much as those that did not. However, one problem is obvious from a casual look at the press release. As the cause of the extinctions are thought to be climate driven, with evidence of sea level change as well as a drop in temperature, are they missing the elephant in the room? What caused the sea levels to change and what caused the weather to plunge. The research is therefore limited to climate change narrative, which is unfortunate. The full article would have a lot more detail and perhaps the climate change stuff was added in order to get published.
At https://phys.org/news/2021-12-aurochs-rhinoceros-fossils-sahara.html … finds of aurochs and rhinoceros that lived in NE Morocco, living between 57,000 and 100,000 years ago. They are a marker of former climate in North Africa. We are then told the Sahara Desert began to form millions of years ago – subject to fluctuations or climate cycles. These appear to correspond to troughs in the Ice Ages. See further info at https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2021.1995381
At https://phys.org/news/2021-12-function-deadly-fungus.html …. a micro organism, candida auris, emerged around 2009 – origin unknown. It led to deadly outbreaks in hospitals and care homes. The fungus has since 'spread' to all inhabited continents with different variants and morphologies. Where does it come from?