John Pickrell

These megatrends will shape Australia’s future

Image credit: shutterstock From climate and sustainability to geopolitics and pandemics, scientific soothsayers have projected the global trends that will impact us most in the next two decades. Ten years ago, CSIRO released a landmark report looking…

Insect swarms might generate as much electric charge as storm clouds

You might feel a spark when you talk to your crush, but living things don’t require romance to make electricity. A study published October 24 in iScience suggests that the electricity naturally produced by swarming insects like honeybees and locusts…

Will we at last get the environment laws we need?

Australia is losing more species than any other developed nation, but this year’s switch of government may herald legislative change to stem destruction. Every five years since the mid-1990s the federal government has released a State of the…

Covid’s ecological cost

Image credit: Justin Gilligan In late 2020 Australian Geographic contributor and Lord Howe Island Marine Park manager Justin Gilligan photographed huge numbers of disposable masks washed up on the beaches of the relatively remote and typically…

‘A diabolical problem needing radical answers’: when cats are not so cute

Millions of feral moggies devour billions of native Australian animals each year, bringing species to the edge of extinction. Subscribe & Save Over $17 PLUS receive a gift. FOR SOMEBODY WHO’S spent decades creating this fenced, predator-free…

A year after Australia’s wildfires, extinction threatens hundreds of species

When Isabel Hyman heads out in coming weeks to the wilds of northern New South Wales, she’s worried about what she won’t find. Fifteen years ago, the malacologist — or mollusk scientist — with the Australian Museum made an incredible discovery among…

A newfound feathered dinosaur sported fuzz and weird rods on its shoulders

The fossil of a chicken-sized, meat eater from Brazil that had a mane of fluffy filaments and a pair of stiff, ribbon-like streamers emerging from both shoulders is the first dinosaur with feathers ever discovered in the Southern Hemisphere. Named…

‘How many assumptions have been made?’ There’s a lot we don’t know about echidnas

Image credit: Ken Griffiths/Shutterstock Subscribe & Save up to $49 PLUS receive a gift. TAHLIA PERRY shows me an extraordinary photograph of an echidna, which is testament to the remarkable resilience of these animals in the face of bushfires. The…

This small dinosaur had a marvelous sense of touch, detailed fossils reveal

A chicken-size dinosaur that lived in what is now Germany about 150 million years ago might have used sensory scales on its tail as it foraged for fish at night. These sensory organs, remarkably similar to those found on a crocodile, likely helped…

Record U.S. and Australian fires raise fears for many species

Summary For the past 3 months, Australian researchers have been searching for endangered spiders and other animals whose habitats have been incinerated by record fires in that country. They are not alone. Intense wildfires around the globe are…

'Jurassic Park' got almost everything wrong about this iconic dinosaur

In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, a nefarious character meets his demise during an encounter with a Dilophosaurus. No taller than a human, the curious dinosaur morphs into a true menace when it extends a large neck frill, hisses, and spits venom in the…

This dinosaur may have been a cannibal, gnarly bite marks reveal

Fossils found covered with ancient bite marks suggest at least one type of large dinosaur was in such dire straits, it began dining on members of its own species.A remarkable 29 percent of 2,368 fossil bones unearthed since 1981 from the late…

'Zoom fatigue' is real, and it's causing a new kind of anxiety amid coronavirus isolation

Share on Facebook Tweet this article It’s about staring at yourself, and the silences. A rift has opened up between researchers who are stressed and exhausted by daily video calls and those who are thriving in a virtual, work-from-home…

Size matters: inside Australia’s National Measurement Institute

THE ABILITY TO precisely measure and calibrate things such as time, distance, weight, temperature and brightness has a surprisingly massive impact on our lives. Even seemingly trifling measurement errors can have dire consequences. Consider, for…

Rare long-necked dinosaur that roamed the polar world unearthed in Australia

A dinosaur relative of T. rex and Velociraptor with an unusually long neck, and which may have transitioned from predator to plant-eater as it reached adulthood, has been unearthed in Victoria. The elaphrosaur was a member of the theropod family of…

The journey to find the Endeavour

IN 22 AUGUST 1770, the crew of HMB Endeavour, led by Lieutenant James Cook, reached Possession Island, off the northern tip of Australia. From there they sailed west to the Dutch colony of Batavia for repairs, before making the long journey home.…

Deep caves are a rich source of dinosaur prints for this paleontologist

Crawling through tight underground passages in southern France, paleontologist Jean-David Moreau and his colleagues have to descend 500 meters below the surface to reach the only known footprints of long-necked dinosaurs called sauropods ever found…

Dancing peacock spiders turned an arachnophobe into an arachnologist

Joseph Schubert spends hours at a time lying in the dirt of the Australian outback watching for tiny flickers in the sparse, ground-hugging foliage. The 22-year-old arachnologist is searching for flea-sized peacock spiders, and he admits, he’s a…

The Great Barrier Reef is suffering its most widespread bleaching ever recorded

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is currently experiencing its third mass bleaching in just five years — and it is the most widespread bleaching event ever recorded. Results from aerial surveys conducted along the 2,000-kilometer-long reef over nine…

Gigantic dinosaur footprints are found on the roof of a cave

Prints show the tracks of three ‘titanosaurs’ that took a seaside stroll more than 165 million years ago.A scientist exploring deep inside a cave in France has discovered huge dinosaur footprints, measuring up to 1.25 metres long, made by some of the…