The Saharan environment in southwest Libya is a sandy, dry world, but fossil records show it was flowing with water and life some 12,000 years ago.

Paleontologists uncovered 17,551 identifiable remains on the Tadrart Acacus Mountains, with 80 percent belonging to fish that fed early humans during the Holocene period.

The remains show there was once an abundance of catfish and tilapia in the area, which died off from over fishing - the bones had cut marks and traces of burning.

The study also found that tilapia decreased more significantly over time, which may have been because catfish have accessory breathing organs allowing them to breathe air and survive in shallow, high-temperature waters.

Global food production is being hit from seemingly every side. Thanks to absolutely crazy weather patterns, giant locust armies in Africa and the Middle East, and an unprecedented outbreak of African Swine Fever in China, a lot less food is being produced around the world than originally anticipated. Even during the best of years we really struggle to feed everyone on the planet, and so a lot of people are wondering what is going to happen as global food supplies become tighter and tighter. The mainstream media in the United States is so obsessed with politics right now that they haven't been paying much attention to this emerging crisis, but the truth is that this growing nightmare is only going to intensify in the months ahead.

In Australia, conditions have been extremely hot and extremely dry, and that helped to fuel the horrific wildfires that we recently witnessed.

And everyone knew that agricultural production in Australia was going to be disappointing this year, but it turns out that it is actually going to be the worst ever recorded...

Australia's hottest and driest year on record has slashed crop production, with summer output expected to fall to the lowest levels on record, according to official projections released Tuesday.

The country's agriculture department said it expects production of crops like sorghum, cotton and rice to fall 66 percent — the lowest levels since records began in 1980-81.

Some twenty years ago, photographer Aditya Singh resigned from his job in civil services in Delhi and moved to the city of Sawai Madhopur in Rajasthan with his wife and artist Poonam so they could be closer to nature. It was there that they started a tourist resort to earn a living.

Over the years, the couple bought about 35 acres bordering the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve on one side. Farmers were selling their land because of predators, including tigers, in the area.

The area, called Bhadlav was barren and had little vegetation but has since been transformed into a lush green forest frequented by wild animals, including tigers.

After settling in Ranthambore, Aditya first visited the Bhadlav area with a BBC filmmaker and became aware that the farmers were selling their land because of the risk of predators searching for prey.


''As a result, farmers were selling their land," Singh told Mongabay India. ''I just bought this and did nothing to it except removing the invasive species. We allowed the land to recover and now after 20 years it has become a lush green patch of forest which is frequently visited by all kind of animals, including tigers, leopards and wild boars.''

For Poonam it was love at first sight when she visited Ranthambore with her husband. "My first sighting was a tigress with three cubs on a hill. It was magical. At the end of the trip, I just asked him if we can move to Ranthambore. He wanted it too and within months we moved. As far as this land is concerned, it was a dream that we both saw an achieved together to have our own area of wilderness," she told Mongabay-India.

Poonam managed the tourist resort with Aditya for twenty years and closed it in 2019.

An aerial photograph of their land shows the stark contrast between their lush green forest and the barren land surrounding them, including the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, with whom they share a boundary.

A farmer got the shock of a lifetime when one of his cows gave birth to a calf with two heads.

Farmer Bhaskar was not anticipating any hitches when his cow gave birth at his farm in Paarasalai village in southern India last week.

He was therefore surprised when a calf popped out with conjoined heads.

The unusual cloven-hoved youngster had four eyes and two mouths, but only one pair of ears.

Bhaskar's farm has quickly became a tourist attraction, receiving visitors from neighbouring villages wanting to see the rare calf.

A small amount of electricity delivered at a specific frequency to a particular point in the brain will snap a monkey out of even deep anesthesia, pointing to a circuit of brain activity key to consciousness and suggesting potential treatments for debilitating brain disorders.

Macaques put under with general anesthetic drugs commonly administered to human surgical patients, propofol and isoflurane, could be revived and alert within two or three seconds of applying low current, according to a study published today in the journal Neuron by a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison brain researchers.

"For as long as you're stimulating their brain, their behavior — full eye opening, reaching for objects in their vicinity, vital sign changes, bodily movements and facial movements — and their brain activity is that of a waking state," says Yuri Saalmann, UW-Madison psychology and neuroscience professor. "Then, within a few seconds of switching off the stimulation, their eyes closed again. The animal is right back into an unconscious state."

Mice have been roused from light anesthesia before with a related method, and humans with severe disorders have improved through electric stimulation applied deep in their brains. But the new study is the first to pull primates in and out of a deep unconscious state, and the results isolate a particular loop of activity in the brain that is crucial to consciousness.

A minor girl of a migrant family, who had gone to look for potatoes in fields of Naulari village, was attacked and mauled to death by stray dogs. The deceased identified as, Simran (12), was a Class IV student of Naulari primary school. Daughter of Jugal Sharma, a resident of Bihar, and she was presently residing on the farms of Sukhdev Singh, a farmer.

As per the information, Simran left her room to collect potatoes from fields for her family on Tuesday evening at about 6 pm. When she did not return till late night, her family members started searching for her. Later, they spotted her lying in a pool of blood with stray dogs sitting nearby. She had died on the spot. The victim's family members managed to shoo away dogs with much difficulty.

The United Nations (UN) has called on the international community to help East African and West Asian countries where devastating swarms of locusts continue to devour crops and threaten food safety in the region.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) stated that Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are the worst affected by the desert locusts that present an extremely alarming and unprecedented threat to food security and the livelihoods of 13 million people.

Some researchers have tied the plague to climate change which has brought a prolonged bout of exceptionally wet weather in East Africa. Desert locusts usually thrive after continuous rainfalls that trigger blooms of vegetation in their normally arid habitats.

Dozens of bird species endemic to Sumatra Island are closer to extinction because of habitat loss from land use change as well as illegal hunting.

According to bird conservation NGO Burung Indonesia, 42 bird species have been listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list. Meanwhile, nine species are listed as critically endangered.

"Most of the species in the critically endangered category are losing their habitat [and are] illegally hunted," Burung Indonesia spokesman Achmad Ridha Junaid said on Tuesday.

For example, cucak rawa (straw-headed bulbuls) were often hunted to be sold as pets, despite their limited number remaining in the wild, Achmad went on to say. The IUCN red list in August 2018 estimated the number of cucak rawa in the wild at 600 to 1,700.

Some experts believe the species is extinct by now.

A second king penguin has been spotted on mainland Tasmania, with one wildlife officer calling the sighting especially rare "unless you're on a tourist ship going to Antarctica".

The penguin was spotted by kayakers at Port Davey in Tasmania's far south-west.

Wildlife officer Julie McInnes said it was a different penguin to the bird spotted at Seven Mile Beach near Hobart last month.


Dr McInnes said it was unusual to have two king penguins sighted in one year.

"This is a really rare thing for people to see, unless you're on a tourist ship going to Antarctica," Dr McInnes told ABC Radio Hobart.

Last year, 150 cetaceans and 269 sea turtles washed up on the nation's shores, the Ocean Conservation Administration (OCA) said yesterday, blaming improper fishing activities for many of the injuries.

Most of the animals were dead when they washed up, the agency said.

Of the beached whales and dolphins, the bodies of 77 were severely rotted, making it difficult to determine why they became stranded, while 33 were bycatch, it said.

Of the beached cetaceans whose species were identified, 43 were finless porpoises, followed by 30 bottlenose dolphins, 13 pygmy killer whales, 10 Fraser's dolphins, six pygmy sperm whales, six dwarf sperm whales and six Taiwanese humpback dolphins, it added.

Of the beached turtles, 240 were green sea turtles, 13 were hawksbill sea turtles, eight were loggerhead sea turtles and eight were olive ridley sea turtles, the agency said.