GeologyRocks

For the benefit of anyone who hasn't yet seen the news:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090519-missing-link-found.html 

Whilst perhaps a little sensationalist it's interesting nonetheless...

The belief that dinosaurs underwent explosive species diversification just before they were wiped out is an illusion. A new study, published today, showed that the main evolutionary changes took place early in the dinosaur's history. The authors constructed a "supertree", which shows how species of dinosaurs evolved and carried out analysis on this to show when the major speciation events occurred.

The paper is published in Royal Proc. Soc. and the abstract and some more links are below:

An attempt to describe 1.8 million species launched yesterday which will provide descriptions, images, videos and sounds of all the species online. Unlike wikispecies, this will be compiled by experts and, hopefully, will be of higher quality and consistancy. Rod Page, a taxonimist from the University of Glasgow, has already tried something like this called iSpecies (more detail on Rod's blog).

By way of space.com, researchers at University of Kansas suggest that the 64 million year cycle in biodiversity, including the Ordovician and Permian extinctions, is linked to the solar system's cyclic position with respect to the galactic plane.

Only 10 million years to the next one!