A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a wood wide web of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of info...
Defining Europe is a slippery undertaking. Its diversity, evolutionary history and shifting borders make the place almost protean. Yet, paradoxically, Europe is immediately recognisable. With its dist...
Malta has a rich and varied faunal history, including dwarf elephants and hippos, and a giant, flightless swan that stood taller than the island’s pachyderms.
We are often appalled at the tragic prevalence of wildlife poaching in Africa, where only a resolute if underfunded band of park guards works to prevent the total elimination of rhino and elephant.* B...
But in 1972 Dutch palaeontologists Bert Boekschoten and Paul Sondaar announced that the bones came from an unusual, tiny hippo, which they named Phanourios minor—’small manifested saint’; the cave had...
One of the biggest obstacles to making a start on climate change is that it has become a cliche before it has even been understood
While we sit in our air-conditioned homes and eat, drink and make merry like cattle in a feedlot without the slightest thought about the consequences of our consumption of water, food and energy, we o...
Goodstein demonstrated that in every case, when compared with the actual costs paid, the estimates were grossly inflated.6 His examples range from asbestos to vinyl, and in all instances but one the e...
When, in 1970, palaeontologist Lambert Beverley Halstead pointed out that Scrotum is a scientifically valid name and the first ever proposed for a dinosaur, a shudder went through the normally stolid...
Heck’s attempted rewilding serves to reinforce a very important fact: Europeans are now the mind over their land. What they desire, the land will become. And if their desires are toxic and dangerous,...
As long as scepticism is based on a sound understanding of science it is invaluable, for that is how science progresses. But poor criticism can lead those who are unfamiliar with the science involved...
There are parallels, I think, between the impact of Europeans on brown bears, and the effects of domestication, particularly on dogs. Both sets of selective pressure have altered the behaviour and die...
Beg them to compare the Oostvaardersplassen not with their dreamtime Europe of the classical age, but with a long-vanished continent where large mammals, rather than agricultural practices, shaped lan...
The Moors, who settled many parts of southern Europe in the eighth century, proved to be enthusiastic naturalisers. They are strongly suspected of, or were clearly responsible for, the introduction of...
But more than anything else, the species owes its spread to a strange phenomenon discovered in 1930 by the biologist Lancelot Hogben. Heavens knows what led him to do it, but Hogben found that if you...
There are now more wolves in Europe than in the United States, including Alaska!