At https://www.livescience.com/animals/extinct-species/colossals-de-extincted-dire-wolf-isnt-a-dire-wolf-and-it-has-not-been-de-extincted-experts-say … was it – or was it not a dire wolf.
On a more prosaic note, at https://phys.org/news/2025-04-reveals-million-years-green-arabia.html … Arabia was green and lush for 8 million years. This allowed the movement of animals and hominims, even humans, out of Africa into greater Asia. That seems to be the focus of the press release, but the study, in the journal Nature, has a different angle – ‘Recurrent humid phases in Arabia over the past 8 million years.’ In other words, the consensus view that the Sahara and Arabian deserts passed through a succession of wet and warm phases and an equal measure of dry periods. In other words, it was not green and pleasant for 8 million years as the climate changed on a succession of occasions.
See also https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250407114252.htm … which has the same official release story.
More puzzling is a post at https://phys.org/news/2025-04-life-recovered-rapidly-site-dino.html … life recovered rapidly at the site of the dinosaur killing asteroid impact. This is about the crater it made – at Chicxulub. It became a hotbed for life, enriching the ocean for thousands of years. The claim here is that the impact created a hydrothermal system which helped make marine life flourish – by generating and circulating nutrients. The findings are derived from ongoing research on a seabed sediment core extracted by an international team. Sounds very much like the Kilauea volcano pouring hot lava into the ocean and stimulating the seabed by warming nutrients that subsequently rose into the surface waters and fed a massive increase in marine life.
Finally, at https://phys.org/news/2025-03-story-humanity-shift-prehistoric-farming.html … a new study in PNAS journal claims researchers have created a mathematical model that challenges consensus views on the transition from hunter gatherers to farming. As artificial intelligence cannot think for itself the model simply trawls the literature, or the literature deemed worthy, in order to come up with a sort of averaging answer to the question. The process is useful in some situations but at the moment is highly overrated. For example, it has a limited focus. Catastrophism, for example, is excluded. If it had been included the answer may have been different. As an example, landscape fires, as occurred at the end of the last Ice Age, may have played a role in the transition to farming. Going hungry has a way of focussing the mind. It could explain a change in behaviour as grasses, in spite of their shallow roots, are usually the first among the plants to emerge after a wild fire. Grasses also set seeds faily rapidly – and grasses include wild forms of wheat, barley, oats, and the various other staples of Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. After a couple of months of seeking incinerated animal remains humans would have quickly paid attention to the grasses that sprouted out of the black and blistered soil. This idea goes way back in SIS journals, to the 1980s.