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Categories: Geoscience: Landslides, Paleontology: Early Mammals and Birds

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Restoration of mangroves and coral reefs can be a cost-effective solution for coastal flood reduction in more than 20 countries across the Caribbean. Researchers used methods from the risk and insurance industry to provide rigorous valuations of these natural defenses and show that they can deliver a positive return on investment, with the benefits from reduced flood damage exceeding the costs of restoration. The results point toward new opportunities to support restoration efforts with funds from sources that support hazard mitigation, climate adaptation, and disaster recovery, including FEMA.

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Flood frequency analysis is a technique used to estimate flood risk, providing statistics such as the '100-year flood' or '500-year flood' that are critical to infrastructure design, dam safety analysis, and flood mapping in flood-prone areas. But the method used to calculate these flood frequencies is due for an update, according to a new study.

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Using radio transmitters, scientists have gained new insights into the behavior of medium ground finches in the Galapagos Islands. A study reveals daily movement patterns covering an area equivalent to the size of 30 soccer fields.

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New research suggests that determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing anatomy rather than gene sequences is misleading. The study shows that we often need to overturn centuries of scholarly work that classified living things according to how they look.

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Paleontologists have debated whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. In a new paper, scientists are unveiling a new method for studying dinosaurs' metabolic rates, using clues in their bones.

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Scientists settle debate surrounding species that laid eggs exploited by early Australian people around 50,000 years ago. Shell proteins point to Genyornis, which was among the 'mega-fauna' to go extinct a few thousand years after humans arrived on the continent.

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Researchers shed light on the way Quetzalcoatlus would have flown, finding that the dinosaur's flying dynamics were actually very different to how it has been depicted in popular culture.

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Jars of tiny platypus and echidna specimens, collected in the late 1800s by the scientist William Caldwell, have been discovered in the stores of Cambridge's University Museum of Zoology.

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Researchers have examined the mass extinction of large animals over the past tens of thousands of years and found that extinct species had, on average, much smaller brains than species that survived.

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Using satellite imagery to study the effects of a 2019 landslide on the Amalia Glacier in Patagonia, a research team found the landslide helped stabilize the glacier and caused it to grow by about 1,000 meters over the last three years.

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Human-related extinctions of the largest herbivores and carnivores are disrupting what appears to be a fundamental feature of past and present ecosystems, says a new study.

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Crows and ravens have great flying ability, which allows them to gain access to new places more easily. While these skills were key to their success, new research also shows that big bodies and big brains played an important role in helping crows and ravens survive in the new climates they occupied.

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Palaeontologists have discovered remarkable new evidence that pterosaurs, the flying relatives of dinosaurs, were able to control the color of their feathers using melanin pigments.

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The first large-scale study of its kind has uncovered more than 4,000 years' worth of distinctive foraging behavior in a species once driven to the brink of extinction.

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A new study combining records of climate change during the last 3.5 million years with fossil evidence of mammals in Africa reveals that times of erratic climate change are not followed by major upheavals in evolution.

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One of the most contentious questions in evolutionary biology is, how did the Amazon become so rich in species? A new study focused on birds examines how the movements of rivers in the Amazon have contributed to that area's exceptional biological diversity. The researchers found that as small river systems change over time, they spur the evolution of new species. The findings also reveal previously unknown bird species in the Amazon that are only found in small areas next to these dynamic river systems, putting them at high risk.

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Researchers have created a detailed set of maps examining the flood risk for all farmland in Iowa. The maps show 450,000 acres of crops in areas with a 50% chance of flooding, and losses from flooding averaging $230 million annually.

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The western United States this century is facing a greatly heightened risk of heavy rains inundating areas recently scarred by wildfires, new research warns. Such events can cause significant destruction, including debris flows, mudslides, and flash floods, because the denuded landscape cannot easily contain the drenching moisture.

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Prehistoric mammals bulked up, rather than develop bigger brains, to boost their survival chances once dinosaurs had become extinct, research suggests.

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Much of a centuries-old debate over where and how new bird species form has now been resolved. Researchers have provided evidence that birds in mountainous areas -- where the vast majority of the planet's species live -- have left lowland habitats for higher and higher mountain elevations throughout their evolution. Millions of years of climatic fluctuations have contributed to pushing bird species upslope -- as is probably happening now.