New research from India reveals that, contrary to long-held scientific beliefs, feeding on trees and shrubs does not provide Asian elephants with more protein than grazing on grass.
India's Eocene rainforests, preserved in amber, offer a vivid window into how intricate ecological webs sustained biodiversity through past climate shifts, providing crucial insights for our warming world.
The fossils were discovered in the Fort Member region of the Jaisalmer Formation, a 165 million-year-old geological formation near Jaisalmer City.
A research team records the distribution of pollen fossils of Crotonoideae species from different regions in India.
A Hoolock Gibbon from Meghalaya [Image Credits: Programme HURO / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
The specimen, which is millions of years older than any previously known fossil, highlights their migration from Africa to Asia.
The clamour about the warming planet and the changing climate is growing louder by the day as we worry about the implications of greenhouse gases on the earth. But, did you know that our planet has seen many such ‘greenhouse periods’ in the past where the concentrations of greenhouse gases were significantly higher, resulting in higher temperatures? Yes, you read that right, and one such period was about 56 to 34 million years ago, called the Eocene epoch.