"Rodent mothers produce more offspring after smelling odors produced by frightened males. This is reported by a team of biologists from Finland and the Netherlands and bring new information the proximate and ultimate explanations of small mammal behavioral responses." Source: Phys.org.
"Fear of being eaten has the power to shape populations and drive evolution. The effect the authors report is large: exposed mothers produce litters with about fifty percent more pups compared to unexposed control mothers."
Comment: If the rat population can grow so explosively in places like India where they're venerated, I hate to think how quickly they reproduce when living in a state of fear. Rats, of course, are considered to be vermin in the West but they're actually nothing to be afraid of according to the noted English rat expert, James Herbert.
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Red arrows are warm surface currents. Blue arrows indicate cooler deep currents. Video from 2008.
"A research team found the fingerprint of a massive flood of fresh water in the western Arctic, thought to be the cause of an ancient cold snap that began around 13,000 years ago. " Source: Science Daily (July, 2018).
"'This abrupt climate change -- known as the Younger Dryas -- ended more than 1,000 years of warming' ... The cause of the cooling event, which is named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) that flourished in the cold conditions in Europe throughout the time, has remained a mystery and a source of debate for decades."
Note: According to this research, the cause of the catastrophic flooding was "a huge influx of freshwater from melting ice sheets and glaciers that gushed into the North Atlantic, disrupting the deep-water circulation system -- Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) -- that transports warmer waters and releases heat to the atmosphere. However, geologic evidence tracing its exact path had been lacking."
This is yet another theory explaining the Younger Dryas period, an abrupt cooling which occurred around 12,000 years ago and apparently led to the extinction of large prehistoric mammals like the woolly mammoth across North America.
"The Siberian unicorn – long believed to have died out 350,000 years ago – was actually still alive as recently as 29,000 years ago, according to the analysis of a well-preserved skull found in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan." Source: RT.
"Unicorn enthusiasts will be disappointed to learn that the extinct creature – also known as Elasmotherium sibiricum – had more in common with rhinos or woolly mammoths than fictional unicorns, however."
Note: "The [Siberian] unicorn, Elasmotherium sibiricum, was shaggy and huge and looked just like a modern rhino, only it carried the most almighty horn on its forehead." Source: Science Alert.
"According to early descriptions, the Siberian unicorn stood at roughly 2 metres (6.6 feet) tall, was 4.5 metres (14.7 feet) long, and weighed about 4 tonnes.
"That's closer to woolly mammoth-sized than horse-sized. Despite its very impressive stature, the unicorn probably was a grazer that ate mostly grass."
"...The team analysed samples from 99 ancient European and Near Eastern dogs remains, spanning the Upper Palaeolithic and Bronze age. The findings suggest that the dogs accompanied people during the Neolithic migration from the Near East to the North and West of Europe. The study also indicates that during the Neolithic dogs from the Near East gradually replaced European populations of dogs associated with hunter-gatherers which existed in Europe as long as 15,000 years ago." Source: University of Oxford.
Note: According to National Geographic (2013), "[m]an's best friends may have started off as European gray wolves, according to scientists whose research is challenging earlier thinking around where and why dogs became domestic animals ... The researchers found that the DNA of modern dogs most closely matched that of ancient wolves from Europe, indicating that dog domestication began there. They also concluded that dogs are descended from a population of ancient European wolves that are now extinct."
"Carved into a sandstone cliff on the edge of a bygone river in the Arabian Desert, a hunter draws his bow for the kill. He is accompanied by 13 dogs, each with its own coat markings; two animals have lines running from their necks to the man’s waist." Source: Science.
"The engravings likely date back more than 8000 years, making them the earliest depictions of dogs, a new study reveals. And those lines are probably leashes, suggesting that humans mastered the art of training and controlling dogs thousands of years earlier than previously thought."
"The farmer discovered the first-ever skull of a Pyrenean mastodon in 2014 while doing work on his land near the village of L'Isle-en-Dodon, about 70 kilometres (44 miles) southwest of Toulouse."
Note:According to Live Science (2016), "Mastodons went extinct around 10,000 years ago. There are many theories as to why. Most of these theories boil down to climate change and/or human hunting, according to Simon Fraser University. Some scientists think that the Earth warmed up from the Ice Age too quickly for the mastodon to adapt or that humans hunted them to extinction." It's also possible that they were wiped out by disease.
Climate change and disease sound like the most probable causes. The idea that small bands of prehistoric hunter-gatherers could have hunted the mastodon to extinction doesn't seem very likely at all.
"In 2015, the frozen remains of two newborn P. spelaea cubs were found by researchers in Pleistocene-age permafrost in the Russian republic of Yakutia, Eastern Siberia. A third youngster was discovered in the same region in 2017, during mining works. The three small cubs were preserved in such pristine condition that scientists brought de-extinction [1] talks to the table." Source: The Vintage News (2018). More information here.
[1] De-extinction, aka resurrection biology or species revivalism, is a proposed process for bringing back extinct species or reviving endangered species, usually by cloning.
According to Wikipedia, the two cubs unearthed in 2015, "estimated to be between 25,000 and 55,000 years old, were discovered close to the Uyandina River in Yakutia, Siberia in permafrost. Research results indicate that the cubs were likely barely a week old at the time of their deaths, as their milk teeth had not fully erupted. Further evidence shows the cubs were hidden at a den site until they were old enough to join the pride. Researchers think that the cubs were trapped and killed by a landslide, and that without air, the cubs were preserved in such good condition. A second expedition to the site where the cubs were found was planned for 2016, in hopes of finding either the remains of a third cub or possibly the cubs' mother."
A third well-preserved cave lion cub was discovered at a different location in 2017. According to the Siberian Times (Nov. 2017), "[t]he prehistoric animal was found in permafrost on the bank of Tirekhtykh River of the Abyisky district of Yakutia by a local resident Boris Berezhnov." The remains, thought to be around 50,000 years old, are also so well-preserved that there has been talk of trying to clone the animal.
Note: Chirpy pop-science presenters are an abomination.
One part of the story which is missing from most of the mass media reports is that the third "cave lion cub" may not be a cave lion after all:
"A Russian man hunting for mammoth tusks in Eastern Siberia made an unexpected discovery in September: the incredibly furry, slightly squished mummy of a cat from the last ice age. Scientists are celebrating the rare discovery, but they're not certain on one major point — whether the mummy is a cave lion cub or a lynx kitten, paleontologists told Live Science." Source: Live Science (2017). It's possible that the cub is a prehistoric Eurasian lynx. I'm not sure where the question stands as of Oct. 2018.
Cloning these cave lions or lynxes or whatever they were probably isn't possible, at least in the foreseeable future, according to several experts quoted by Live Science.
A mummified wolf pup and caribou believed to have walked Earth over 50,000 years ago were discovered with tissue and fur intact — a remarkable find, Canadian authorities say." Source: USA Today.
"The caribou was found at the site of a 80,000-year-old volcanic ash bed and officials believe it's among the oldest mummified mammal tissue in the world, according to a release."
Note: "Remarkably well-preserved, with hair, skin and muscle tissue intact, specimens of this quality are extremely rare and have garnered a great deal of international scientific interest," according to the Yukon press release.
"Archaeologists have discovered a Stone Age kill site full of mammoth remains where ancient people used to herd the large mammals so they could be killed and butchered. The discovery was made during road works on a new bypass near Drasenhofen, a town in the Austrian state of Lower Austria." Source: Archaeology News Network.
Note: This is apparently the first mammoth kill site to be discovered in Austria.
"Last Monday, farmer James Bristle and his neighbor were digging a trench to install a drainage pipe in his wheat field on the outskirts of Chelsea, Michigan, when their backhoe suddenly struck something hard about eight feet underground. At first, the pair thought they had hit a buried piece of wood, perhaps a fence post, but they soon realized they had uncovered something neither had ever seen before—an enormous three-foot-long bone." Source: History (2015).
According to PBS (2016), "[r]enowned mammoth expert Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan has recently presented fresh evidence that Ice Age hunters were involved in the mammoth kill. Together with a preliminary radiocarbon date, that may put the find among the earliest convincing signs of humans in the Americas." (Emphasis added)
Video from 2016.
Last year, a second excavation at the Bristle farm turned up more bones.