Prof. Wolfgang Kiessling, Chair of Paleobiology, and Tasnuva Ming Khan, also from the field of Paleobiology, together with scientists from South Africa, England, Brazil, Norway, Trinidad and India, have succeeded in finding that a third of all endemic species living in rural areas are threatened to ... Continue

In Earth’s history, there have been several catastrophes in which a large part of life on Earth has been wiped out. In the programme Campus Talks on ARD-alpha, Wolfgang Kießling shows parallels to the current climate situation on Earth. He gives an outlook to what extent a mass extinction of species... Continue

Nussaibah Raja Schoob and other paleontologists are working to overcome some historical legacies of their discipline and change how people learn about natural history. She came to the attention of the New York Times. Congratulations, Nussaibah! Continue

Is clustering of extinctions really an increase in extinction rate or is it merely generated by reduced sedimentation rates that reduce the spacing between individual extinctions with long breaks between each other? Niklas Hohmann, Paleobiology Master student, has examined this question in his Bachelor thesis, which is now published in PALAIOS (Hohmann 2021). Continue

Abrupt changes in environmental signals recorded in an interval of strata can be the result of (1) fast changes in environmental conditions and average sedimentation rate or (2) average changes in environmental conditions and slow sedimentation rate. The new study by Dr. Emilia Jarochowska and co-authors, published in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, proposes a method to estimate relative changes in depositional rates and test it in a sedimentary section Continue