Identifying the origin of information posted on social media and how this may have changed over time can be very helpful to users in determining whether they trust it or not. This currently requires disproportionate effort for average user, who instead has rely fact-checkers other intermediaries identify provenance them. We show that is possible disintermediate process by providing an automated...

Mastodon (Mammut americanum) remains unearthed during excavation of ancient sediments usually consist only of skeletal material, due to postmortem decomposition of soft tissues by microorganisms. Two recent excavations of skeletal remains in anoxic sediments in Ohio and Michigan, however, have uncovered organic masses which appear to be remnants of the small and large intestines, respectively. ...

We sequenced six endogenous collagen peptides from Tyrannosaurus rex bone fragments using mass spectrometry. Five sequences match birds, but only two match amphibians, supporting dinosaur-bird relationships. Buckley et al. reinterpret and misinterpret our data and question sequence authenticity, but they used a suboptimal phylogenetic algorithm to analyze only a subset of reported sequences and...

Climate change represents one of the most serious threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The current rate of temperature change, driven primarily by the human combus‐ tion of fossil fuels, far exceeds rates that have occurred in at least 10,000 years (lower Pleisto‐ cene) and perhaps much longer (IPCC, 2014). That last major climate change event precipitated a mass extinction that l...

Introduction The end Pleistocene was a time of considerable ecological upheaval. Recent work has explored the megafauna extinction’s role in altering ecosystem processes. Analyses functional traits withing communities reveal hidden consequences extinction beyond declines taxonomic diversity. Functional diversity analyses offer new insight into our understanding past ecosystems and may even info...

Given that 99.9% of species that have ever existed on the Earth are already extinct, the most effective approach to examining extinction over long time scales is to delve into the 3.7 billion year history of extinction preserved in the fossil record. The “discovery” of extinction, both as a philosophical concept and a biological reality, can be traced back to Baron Georges Cuvier and his studie...

We sampled 143 individuals from Rancho La Brea (RLB) large faunal collections for bone collagen stable carbon (dC) and nitrogen (dN) isotope ratios. These collections were recovered from asphalt seeps in the Los Angeles Basin, California, USA, and date from f 40 to 12 ka. Our findings indicate that despite a slight reduction in collagen nitrogen content, RLB skeletal remains are relatively well...

Of the scores of North American archaeological sites claimed to provide evidence of human hunting of now-extinct Pleistocene mammals, only about a dozen have compelling evidence of such predation. In all instances, the animals involved were mammoth and mastodon (1). In PNAS, Sanchez et al. (2) contend that a third genus of proboscidean (elephants and their near relatives), the gomphothere Cuvie...