Three hundred and fifty square kilometers of Turkey's coastline has been brought under environmental protection in a recent announcement by the Turkish government. This new area represents a significant expansion of the existing marine protected area network along the country's Mediterranean coast and firmly establishes Turkey as a leader in marine conservation in the most overfished sea on the planet.

Tropical islands have an important ally when it comes to battling storms and sea-level rise: seagrass. During hurricane Irma, an extremely powerful Category 5 storm that hit the North Caribbean in 2017, NIOZ scientist Rebecca James witnessed how native seagrass meadows along the coast of Sint Maarten held their ground, reduced coastal erosion and lowered the chances of flooding. In the years of research during her Ph.D., she saw the pressures on this natural storm protection increasing. In her […]

Some 92 to 66 million years ago, as the age of dinosaurs waned, giant marine lizards called mosasaurs roamed an ocean that covered North America from Utah to Missouri and Texas to the Yukon. The air-breathing predators were streamlined swimmers that devoured almost everything in their path, including fish, turtles, clams and even smaller mosasaurs.

Freshwater turtles may have a role in regulating water quality in river systems by scavenging fish carcasses, suggests a study of Emydura macquarii, a vulnerable freshwater turtle species found in Australia. The findings are published in Scientific Reports.

It's not often a new mass extinction is identified; after all, such events were so devastating they really stand out in the fossil record. In a new paper, published today in Science Advances, an international team has identified a major extinction of life 233 million years ago that triggered the dinosaur takeover of the world. The crisis has been called the Carnian Pluvial Episode.