Climate & Earth - Human Crisis News

A Farmer’s Fossil Turns Out to Be a New Feathered Dinosaur, and a Clue on Flight

30Sep

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

A Farmer’s Fossil Turns Out to Be a New Feathered Dinosaur, and a Clue on Flight

A fossil picked up by a farmer in western Liaoning has been named Norellraptor barsboldi, a new feathered dinosaur described in a study published in Nature Communications on 29 September 2026. The 57-centimetre skeleton belongs to the microraptorines, small bird-like dinosaurs whose feathered limbs have long fuelled a debate over whether flight evolved once or several times. The authors say Norellraptor barsboldi supports the second answer, though their case rests on a single specimen and a preliminary bone analysis. The skeleton is complete, and it adds a new name to a group that Discover Wildlife notes may contain more than a dozen genera. How a Farmer's Find Became Norellraptor barsboldi The specimen was found near Lamadong Town in Jianchang County and donated in 2023 to the mu...

California Brings Back Statewide Wildlife Coexistence Program After 2024 Funding Lapse

30Sep

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

California Brings Back Statewide Wildlife Coexistence Program After 2024 Funding Lapse

The state has revived the California Wildlife Coexistence Program, a statewide service for handling run-ins between people and wild animals, after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1135 on Tuesday, September 29. The program sits inside the Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and is meant to help residents, ranchers and communities prevent conflicts with wildlife without killing the animals. The earlier version lost its funding and ended in 2024. The law was written by Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, whose office says it takes effect on Jan. 1, 2027. That office also says she helped secure $5 million in this year's state budget for the effort. Defenders of Wildlife, which co-sponsored the bill with the National Wildlife Federation, says it passed both chambers of the Legisl...

Rare Two-Headed Diamondback Terrapin Hatchling Under Care on Cape Cod

30Sep

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

Rare Two-Headed Diamondback Terrapin Hatchling Under Care on Cape Cod

A two-headed diamondback terrapin that hatched in mid-September is now being cared for at a wildlife center on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The baby turtle weighs just 5.2 grams, about the size of a nickel, and its two heads share one body. Vets do not yet know how it will develop, but staff are watching its feeding, growth and behavior closely, and the case is only the third of its kind the center has handled in five to six years. How the hatchling reached the Cape Wildlife Center The hatchling arrived at the Cape Wildlife Center in Barnstable on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026. Staff from Mass Audubon's Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary brought it in after it was found at a protected nesting site in Wellfleet. Fox Weather reported that the find came during nest monitoring, shortly after the tu...

Nearly a Century Later, Two New Sea Spider Species Turn Up in the Salish Sea

24Sep

By HCN Editorial1 Comment

Climate & Earth

Nearly a Century Later, Two New Sea Spider Species Turn Up in the Salish Sea

Two new sea spider species have been described from Canada's Salish Sea, the first to be added there in almost a century. Researchers at the University of British Columbia announced the pair on Wednesday, September 23, in a study published in Organisms Diversity & Evolution. One has red eyes and hairy legs. The other is routinely found under a coat of debris and its own parasites. Why the Salish Sea's sea spiders went unrecorded for so long Sea spiders are marine arthropods, not true spiders. They are distant relatives of spiders, scorpions and horseshoe crabs, and they have lived in the ocean for roughly 500 million years. Some species have as many as 12 legs, all of them carry a sucking proboscis, and body size runs from under a centimetre to more than 70 centimetres in Antarct...

A Tropical Turtle Nested in California for the First Time. Will the Eggs Hatch?

24Sep

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

A Tropical Turtle Nested in California for the First Time. Will the Eggs Hatch?

On 16 September, an olive ridley sea turtle crawled out of the Pacific near Seal Beach in Orange County, dug a hole in the sand and laid her eggs, something no sea turtle has ever been recorded doing on the US West Coast. The Huntington Beach Fire Department filmed it, and the footage was later shared by NOAA Fisheries. Three days afterwards a turtle came ashore again near the Huntington Beach Pier, a few miles to the south, and laid a second nest. Both spots are now fenced off and signposted, and each is thought to hold between 50 and 100 eggs. NOAA Fisheries describes it as the first-ever recorded natural nesting of any sea turtle species on this coast. The bigger questions come after that: why an olive ridley sea turtle turned up in Southern California at all, whether these eggs have...

Bats Have a Birthplace at Last: Europe, 65 Million Years Ago

24Sep

By HCN Editorial2 Comments

Climate & Earth

Bats Have a Birthplace at Last: Europe, 65 Million Years Ago

Bats originated in Europe, according to the largest study of bat evolution ever attempted, and they did so about 65 million years ago, not long after the dinosaurs vanished. The paper, published in Nature on Wednesday, comes from 137 researchers in 64 countries working under the Bat1K consortium, and it overturns earlier ideas that pointed to Asia, Africa or North America. The authors say the finding that bats originated in Europe settles a debate that has run for decades. Whether it stays settled will depend on fossils not yet found, but the case is unusually well built. The evidence that bats originated in Europe Two kinds of evidence went in. The first was DNA from 103 living bat species, covering all 21 recognised families, with dozens of the genomes assembled from scratch for th...

A 60-Year-Old Fossil in a London Museum Just Reset the Clock on Tanzania’s “Oldest Dinosaurs”

23Sep

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

A 60-Year-Old Fossil in a London Museum Just Reset the Clock on Tanzania’s “Oldest Dinosaurs”

For sixty years, a box in a London museum held the answer to a question nobody was asking yet. Now that it's finally been opened, scientists say it may reset how old some of the world's earliest dinosaur fossils really are. The bones belong to a newly named animal, scientists are calling it the Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda fossil, dug up in Tanzania and only now identified by a team at the University of Bristol. It wasn't a dinosaur. It was something stranger and, in its own way, more useful, a tusked, beaked plant-eater called a dicynodont, part of the mammal family tree, living around 240 million years ago in rocks that also happen to hold Tanzania's most famous fossil mystery: possible evidence of the earliest dinosaurs anywhere on Earth. Here's where the story gets interesting. A Br...

Astronomers Pick Up the First Radio Signal Traced Directly to a Planet Outside Our Solar System

23Sep

By HCN Editorial1 Comment

Climate & Earth

Astronomers Pick Up the First Radio Signal Traced Directly to a Planet Outside Our Solar System

Astronomers have confirmed the first Beta Pictoris b radio detection ever traced directly to a planet outside our solar system, not a signal from anyone, but the fingerprint of an aurora and a magnetic field far stronger than our own. The planet is Beta Pictoris b, a young gas giant roughly 63 light-years from Earth, orbiting a star hotter and more massive than the sun. Researchers from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian and the University of Oregon observed the system four separate times across 2025 and 2026 using South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope array, catching short radio bursts that flared and faded within minutes, layered over a steadier background hum. How the Beta Pictoris b Radio Detection Was Confirmed Radio emission from planet-hosting star systems...

Katmai’s Biggest Bracket Yet: 16 Bears, Record Cubs, and a Champion Defending His Crown

23Sep

By HCN Editorial2 Comments

Climate & Earth

Katmai’s Biggest Bracket Yet: 16 Bears, Record Cubs, and a Champion Defending His Crown

Sixteen brown bears are competing in this year's Fat Bear Week 2026 bracket, four more than any previous edition, after Katmai National Park and Preserve reported one of its busiest cub seasons in years. Voting opened Tuesday at Brooks River in southwest Alaska, where the bears spend their summers gorging on salmon before a winter with nothing to eat at all. The single-elimination bracket, run jointly by the National Park Service, Explore.org and the Katmai Conservancy, pairs bears head-to-head through fatbearweek.org, with the public choosing who advances each round. The final vote closes on September 29. Fat Bear Week 2026: A Bigger Field Than Ever Twelve bears made the cut in past years. This time the field includes five family units, two subadults, four single adult females an...

Nations Fall Short of 2030 Deadline to Protect 30% of Earth’s Land and Oceans, New Analysis Finds

23Sep

By HCN Editorial1 Comment

Climate & Earth

Nations Fall Short of 2030 Deadline to Protect 30% of Earth’s Land and Oceans, New Analysis Finds

The 30x30 biodiversity target is not going to be met on the current trajectory. That's the blunt conclusion of new research published Wednesday by a coalition of environmental groups led by the US-based Campaign for Nature, and the numbers behind it are hard to argue with: global land and inland-water protection sits at roughly 20% right now, while marine protection is stuck at around 10%. Both are well short of the goal that nearly 200 countries signed up to just a few years ago, protecting 30% of the world's land and oceans by 2030. That goal came out of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in late 2022 under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. It wasn't just a land-and-sea commitment, either. Countries also promised to put together at least $200 billion ...

Typhoon Dujuan Nears Tokyo as Level 5 Landslide Alert Issued for Izu Island Town

21Sep

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

Typhoon Dujuan Nears Tokyo as Level 5 Landslide Alert Issued for Izu Island Town

The Typhoon Dujuan Tokyo threat is now at its sharpest. Japan's 25th named storm of the year is moving up the Pacific side of the country, and the capital region is bracing for a very wet Monday night. Heavy rain has already soaked the Izu Islands and parts of Chiba. In response, forecasters have placed the town of Oshima under the highest-level landslide warning. What the Typhoon Dujuan Tokyo Warnings Mean The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has issued a Level 5 landslide warning for the northern Izu Islands, the top tier of Japan's five-step alert scale. Oshima sits about 110 km south of Tokyo. Other parts of the Kanto region are under Level 4 warnings covering heavy rain, landslides and flooding. The rainfall totals explain the concern. In the 24 hours to 7:40 a.m. Monday, Iz...

Nepal Demands Climate Compensation From Top Polluters as Families Bury Effigies for the Missing

9Sep

By HCN Editorial1 Comment

Climate & Earth

Nepal Demands Climate Compensation From Top Polluters as Families Bury Effigies for the Missing

Climate compensation is now Nepal's official demand of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters, after a flood disaster that has killed more than 1,350 people while families in the hardest-hit valleys are still holding funerals for relatives whose bodies have never been found. Foreign Minister Shishir Khanal said this week that China, the United States and India bear outsized responsibility for a warming climate that Nepal did almost nothing to create. Nepal's government has asked the United Nations' loss and damage fund for financial help, and separately submitted a climate compensation claim to major polluting nations, arguing the disaster is a matter of justice rather than aid. In the same week, Nepal's disaster authority raised the confirmed death toll to 1,355, with nearly 5,000...

UK’s Hottest Summer on Record Is Costing Small Flower Growers Their Livelihoods

8Sep

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

UK’s Hottest Summer on Record Is Costing Small Flower Growers Their Livelihoods

The UK flower growers heatwave of 2026 has done what no single bad season usually does: it has pushed working farms out of business in real time. Britain just recorded its hottest summer since national weather records began in 1884, and for a small, largely invisible corner of the country's agricultural economy, that record has translated directly into lost income. Independent flower growers say the heat destroyed entire crops this year, leaving some with nothing to bring to the London markets that make up their livelihood. The story has circulated in the UK mostly as a seasonal weather curiosity. It is, more precisely, a story about small businesses absorbing a climate cost with no safety net to catch them. Met Office provisional figures confirm summer 2026 as the UK's warmest on recor...

Nepal-China Border Flood Toll Passes 750, Thousands Missing

31Aug

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

Nepal-China Border Flood Toll Passes 750, Thousands Missing

Rasuwa, Nepal - The Nepal-China border flood has now killed more than 750 people, with an additional 3,000 still unaccounted for on both sides of the frontier, ten days after a wall of water and rock tore through the mountains along the frontier, according to figures released Sunday by Nepali police and Chinese state media. Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has recorded 734 deaths and 2,498 missing within its borders from the Nepal-China border flood, while officials in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China have confirmed 16 deaths and 546 missing in Gyirong County, on the Chinese side of the crossing. Some victims' bodies have been recovered as far as 240 kilometers downstream in neighboring India, carried there by the force of the flood. What Triggere...

Flores Earthquake Death Toll Rises to 70 as Aid Reaches Isolated Villages

20Aug

By HCN EditorialNo Comments

Climate & Earth

Flores Earthquake Death Toll Rises to 70 as Aid Reaches Isolated Villages

Five days after a magnitude-7.7 earthquake tore through Indonesia's Flores Sea, the Flores earthquake death toll stood at 70 as of Wednesday, August 19, with disaster officials warning the number could still climb. Crews are cutting their way into the last isolated communities of East Nusa Tenggara province. More than 40,000 people remain in tents and evacuation shelters, and relief convoys are only now reaching villages that landslides sealed off for days. What Happened on August 15 The quake struck at 5:58 a.m. local time on Saturday, its rupture centered roughly 68 kilometers north-northwest of the coastal city of Ende, at a depth of about 10 kilometers. That shallow depth, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is what allowed the shaking to hit the surface with far more for...