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Paleoecology (also spelled palaeoecology) is the study of interactions between organisms and/or interactions between organisms and their environments across geologic timescales. As a discipline, paleoecology interacts with, depends on and informs a variety of fields including paleontology, ecology, climatology and biology. Read more...
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@mander.xyzhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-021-01476-0
West African cuisine has long been known for its distinct ingredients and flavours, often enhanced by the addition of a large and diverse range of plant foods. A traditional meal comprises a starchy staple cooked in a pot and served with a sauce prepared from vegetables, fish and/or meat, often accompanied by pulses. However, reconstructing the antiquity of the full range of plant use by ancient peoples, using archaeobotanical remains, in West Africa is challenging due to their somewhat fragile nature. Hence, there is a strong bias toward food plants that survive in charred condition, rendering invisible those that easily decompose, such as leafy plants and tubers. Here, we combine organic residue analysis of 458 prehistoric vessels, with archaeobotanical evidence from ten sites of the prehistoric Nok culture, Nigeria, spanning a period of around 1500 years, beginning around the middle of the second millennium BC and terminating in the last century BC. Our results reveal a range of highly diverse and complex lipid distributions denoting the preparation and processing of various plant types, including leafy vegetables or ‘greens’, cereals, pulses and underground storage organs, possibly yams. Here, we render previously unidentifiable leafy plant use visible and suggest an early origin for the plant component of modern-day West African cuisine.
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/fossils/complex-life-arose-earlier-than-we-thought-16-billion-year-old-fossils-reveal
Researchers uncovered fossils of multicellular eukaryotes that are over a billion years old.
https://theconversation.com/the-botanical-imperialism-of-weeds-and-crops-how-alien-plant-species-on-the-first-fleet-changed-australia-220653
It wasn’t just colonists and convicts who invaded Australia in 1788 – invasive plant species arrived too.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/01/240126140532.htm
Seagrasses provide the foundation of one of the most highly biodiverse, yet vulnerable, coastal marine ecosystems globally. They arose in three independent lineages from their freshwater ancestors some 100 million years ago and are the only fully submerged, marine flowering plants. Moving to such a radically different environment is a rare evolutionary event and definitely not easy. How did they do it? New reference quality genomes provide important clues with relevance to their conservation and biotechnological application.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/23/1226146217/new-fossils-suggest-kelp-forests-have-swayed-in-the-seas-for-at-least-32-million
https://www.sciencealert.com/bizarre-fossils-are-neither-plant-nor-animal-but-a-weird-fusion-of-life
If you ever find yourself playing a game of twenty questions, there's a little-known life form you can pick that is sure to leave your opponent stumped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjW4Rf43oMA
Today, I'm joined by my friend Joey from @CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt to talk about the Silurian period: a time of major innovations for all life forms on the ...
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2023GL105581
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240116-the-dark-earth-revealing-the-amazons-secrets
Amid the discovery of a lost city in the Amazon rainforest, scientists are uncovering a different kind of relic underground – one that's still being used today.
https://polarbearscience.com/2023/06/16/new-evidence-that-polar-bears-survived-1600-years-of-ice-free-summers-in-the-early-holocene/
New evidence indicates that Arctic areas with the thickest ice today probably melted out every year during the summer for about 1,600 years during the early Holocene (ca. 11.3-9.7k years ago), maki…