A wide variety of fruits and seeds that were smothered in the ash from a volcanic eruption nearly 75 million years ago suggest flowering plants were diverse and thriving in the time of the dinosaurs, far earlier than previously known.

Researchers had thought the emergence of large seeds and fruits followed the end-Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago, and was tied to the rise of mammals and birds.

“Now, we have evidence that large fruit and seeds and the related ecological conditions can be traced back to 10 million years before the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs,” says at the University of California, Berkeley.

Lee and his colleagues analysed ancient fossils collected from the Jose Creek Formation in New Mexico over the past three decades. They are so well preserved because, like the Roman city of Pompeii, the plant fossils were locked within a bed of ash from a volcanic eruption.

The team discovered an extraordinary 77 different kinds of fruits and seeds. Such a ready banquet of nutritious fruit would almost certainly have been eaten by herbivorous dinosaurs and other animals.

The findings show flowering plants that enclose their seeds in fruit, also known as angiosperms, were co-evolving with the animals that fed on them as a way of dispersing their seeds.

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“While many Mesozoic animals, like dinosaurs, birds, pterosaurs and mammals, were suggested to have consumed angiosperm diaspores, we didn’t have the botanical evidence supporting this,” says Lee. “Now we have.”

The first flowering plants emerge in the fossil record 136 million years ago, but, until now, it was thought early forms were mostly small and weedy and vastly different to the range of species that dominate Earth’s forests today.

In Cretaceous deposits elsewhere, the fruit and seeds are roughly the size of a poppy seed on average – far smaller than the blueberry-sized seeds at Jose Creek.

Of the 77 new types of seeds identified by the scientists, nearly a third are classified as fleshy while only 5 per cent are winged, which would imply dispersal by wind rather than animals.

Alongside the flowering plants, the tropical forest also contained several kinds of conifers, including a redwood relative, as well as palms.

While many of the seed shapes are familiar to us today, the forest structure would have been extremely different and unfamiliar, says team member , also at the University of California, Berkeley.

The larger fossils can be compared to blueberries and large acorns in size, she says. “We don’t have a good idea which plant group produced these; for that, you have to find them attached to shoots with leaves,” says Looy. “However, when they are fleshy they are likely dispersed by larger herbivores.”

�ճ����New Scientist Book Club��has been reading a popular-science classic in June: Richard Dawkins’s��, which celebrates its 50^th��anniversary this year.

I hadn’t previously read this one – it had always intimidated me (an English graduate). But my colleague Rowan Hooper, a behavioural ecologist as well as our podcast editor, reread it to see how it holds up today and concluded it pretty much did. He had a few issues with the biology and said it “feels its age” – Dawkins himself admits to “sexist pronouns” in a 1989 preface – but Rowan found that “the core message remains relevant not just because genes being selfish is a brilliant meme (a term Dawkins coins at the end of the book), but because it is such a powerful way to understand how evolution operates: the metaphor makes us think as if genes behave selfishly”.

Read an extract from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the New Scientist Book Club’s read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published

It was time to gird my loins and embark on a book I’ve always been a bit embarrassed for omitting. I have to admit to being a little exhausted at first: there was preface after preface in my edition, in which Dawkins was arguing with all sorts of people about how the book had been received. This was somewhat confusing, given I hadn’t – yet – ��read it. I should have skipped straight to the first chapter.

Once I got into it, though, I found myself (mostly) carried along swimmingly by Dawkins’s writing. He certainly has a knack for a good metaphor – I particularly liked the idea of our bodies as “survival machines” for genes. Without having studied any biology after the age of 16, I got my head around his central point: that natural selection works because genes, or copies of them (replicators, as he calls them), are out to survive, building the optimal bodies (or survival machines) in order to do so.

I did find his tone a little irascible and hectoring at times. It was like he was having conversations with various colleagues/rivals about his points, rather than the general reader. For example, talking about how “one gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies”, he writes that “it is an argument that some of my most respected colleagues obstinately refuse to agree with, so you must forgive me if I seem to labour it!”. We’re also firmly told about the correct pronunciation of “algae” (a hard “g”, people). There’s a lot of that sort of thing, but I finished feeling pleased to have got my head (mostly) around his argument.

Book club members were less impressed – this is, I think, the book that has received the most negative comments of any we’ve read, with a handful of members deciding not to join us in reading it at all, as they disagreed with some of Dawkins’s personal views. (I share the perspective of member pwhipp, who wrote on our channel: “I don’t think we should reject serious scientific writing simply because the author is combative, controversial, or personally irritating. If we did that consistently, the shelves would become very thin indeed.”) Pwhipp, by the way, called The Selfish Gene “an important and very well-written book, whatever one thinks of Dawkins’ public persona or his outspoken atheism”.

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Pwhipp was in the minority, however. Alan P was one re-reader who felt “underwhelmed” by The Selfish Gene. “The text is (as he admits himself but doesn’t change) sexist throughout. It’s not just the assumption of male pronouns for general statements, but there are some comments in the end notes and the text of the book itself that even for the eighties are questionable,” he wrote. “The tone is argumentative – sometimes I’m not clear that it isn’t argument for its own sake – but it’s definitely jarring. The endless footnotes contradicting the text are really difficult to follow. If the science has changed then the text of the book needs to change as well. So it may be that it was a masterly summary of the known science in its day – but now it’s a bad tempered, difficult to follow, mess.”

Alan did enjoy the new chapter “Nice guys finish first”, added to later editions: “I was always of the opinion that genes don’t make ethics so it’s nice to have the idea that even if genetic determinism was a thing, that cooperation is a successful strategy in the wild.”

The Selfish Gene at 50: Why Dawkins’s evolution classic still holds up

When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book’s gene-centred view of evolution still has much to teach us in today’s genetic age

Dee55, meanwhile, first read The Selfish Gene back in the early 80s and found it “an absolute revelation” at the time. Going back to it was “interesting”, but, as a humanities graduate, Dee55 found “specific challenges in following some of the arguments”. “I enjoyed the Chapter 5 stuff on the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) as a fun ride, but I think I need to reread it before continuing. I am very aware that I am just not in a position to assess RD’s ideas in the context of other evolutionary biology thinking,” Dee55 wrote.

Rowan took a deeper dive into the book in a longer piece for New Scientist, speaking to biologists about its message and what still stands today. Taking into account developments in the field that have happened over the past 50 years, Rowan wrote that “all the evolutionary biologists I spoke to for this piece struggled to find major problems with The Selfish Gene”. There was one exception: the idea of the meme, which, despite its memetic proliferation today, “doesn’t hold up”, he was told.

Overall, then, a thorny choice: this particular piece of popular science was notedly unpopular for the New Scientist Book Club.

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A set of exquisitely preserved 300-million-year-old fossils suggests that early four-limbed vertebrates did not undergo a metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages, challenging conventional ideas about the evolution of life on land.

“We have for a very long time assumed that these animals were broadly amphibian-like, and that this life cycle would have bridged the gap between life in the water and life on land,” says at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Today’s reptiles, birds, mammals and amphibians belong to a group called tetrapods, which evolved from lobe-finned fish around 390 million years ago. But almost nothing was known about the early developmental stages of these ancestral lobe-finned fish, says at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.

Pardo and his colleague , also at the Field Museum, examined a collection of fossils that were unearthed between the 1960s and 1990s at the Mazon Creek fossil site, south-west of Chicago. The preserved animals lived 307 million to 309 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Period.

Embolomeres, which had a body around 2 metres long in adulthood, were the largest tetrapods in the Carboniferous and one of the top predators. They spent most of their time in water, but had small legs with which they could have clambered onto the land.

The fossils included two 2-centimetre-long baby embolomeres, which were so well preserved that the scientists could see soft tissues and even egg yolk.

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In tadpoles, the yolk sac remains inside the body for a few days after hatching as a store of energy. But the young embolomeres had a yolk sac outside the body, similar to the case for some young fish such as lungfish.

Amphibian larvae, such as tadpoles, have external gills that enable them to breathe underwater, but the young embolomeres did not. “The absence of external gills across early development in these animals is the smoking gun,” says Pardo.

The skull and skeleton have “all the important parts seen in an adult embolomere”, says Pardo. The fossils show that embolomeres remained more or less the same from the time they hatched from their eggs until they reached adulthood.

“Human bodies basically work the same way from birth through adulthood, but we get bigger and our proportions change, but we don’t undergo the sort of fast, rapid change you see in a frog or salamander,” says Pardo. “Our fossils show that this sort of life cycle was the norm for our earliest terrestrial ancestors, too.”

Although embolomeres were aquatic, Pardo argues that the evidence available suggests our earliest terrestrial ancestors did not have a tadpole-like stage either. The team also studied the fossil remains of two other early tetrapod species that were alive at the same time and in the same place as the embolomeres.

“None of these show any evidence of a tadpole-like stage,” says Pardo. “Neither do other fishy tetrapod relatives such as early lungfishes and coelacanths. So is it impossible that a tadpole stage showed up somewhere and was subsequently lost? Maybe, but it seems vanishingly unlikely with the data we have.”

This study fills in a much-needed knowledge gap, says Long. “It shows how early tetrapod-like fishes living about 308 million years ago did not need to develop a tadpole phase in order to invade land, as was previously thought by some scientists.”

Fossil hunting in the Australian outback

Join this extraordinary adventure through the heart of Australia’s fossil frontier. Once a shallow inland sea millions of years ago, eastern Australia is now a hotspot for fossils. Over 13 unforgettable days, you’ll travel deep into the outback, tracing the footsteps of prehistoric giants and uncovering the secrets of Earth’s ancient history.

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This is a month to look out for some powerful new books, with authors taking on challenges of all sorts and imagining whole new worlds. There are fresh ways to think about a cancer diagnosis, a book tackling the real inner world of hormones, in which we are all hormonal all the time, plus a major re-envisioning of the natural world where we abandon the shallows of competition for the depth and intricacies of connection and togetherness. Welcome to the symbiocene.

(editor-in-chief Alice Roberts)

It’s quite hard going to get an up-to-date grip on human evolution, even for the best-briefed adult, so a book with sophisticated text and excellent illustrations and diagrams can only be a good thing. Especially if it is curated and edited by Alice Roberts, biological anthropologist, palaeopathologist, broadcaster – and professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, UK. She worked with a generous-sized international team of experts in many fields of human evolution, including archaeology, palaeontology, anthropology and cognitive science. Each chapter is devoted to the evolution of a part of the body, including hands, lungs and the digestive system, building a complex picture of our origins and nature. There are so many questions to address: when did we invent clothes? Why are our babies altricial (underdeveloped and highly dependent at birth)? What happened to the other modern humans? Are we the only animals to have become quite so self-aware? Just the kind of book to take on a very long trip.

�� by Saira Hameed

For Saira Hameed, we are all hormonal, all of the time – it’s not colloquial shorthand for feeling tired, moody, puffy or all three. But then, as a consultant endocrinologist, she knows that the tiny hypothalamus (“an implausible leader of the body’s hormones”, as she calls it) controls the myriad processes that are all about everyday life and that we barely notice when they work: appetite, body weight, thirst, stress, sleep, growth, metabolism, puberty, reproduction and sex drive. This all makes for a fascinating book built around her clinical practice, featuring patients whose lives have been interrupted by the faulty signalling of any of the 50-plus hormones that run the human show. A sneak peek reveals a young boy whose life has been shattered by a brain tumour too stuck onto the hypothalamus for a clean excision. His sleep is erratic, his weight is soaring and it’s going to take more operations and tweaking hormones to approach giving him a life that works. And there are stories of terrible exhaustion and crushing infertility. It looks to be compelling stuff – and she sounds like the kind of consultant you would want on your side.

New Scientist recommends Togetherness, a radical new view of life

An exploration of how biological cooperation underpins all life - and why we’ve overlooked its power until now - makes thrilling reading, finds Penny Sarchet

by Rowan Hooper

Rowan Hooper is New Scientist’s pod meister and a senior editor here for many years. His third book sets out to change all our minds, and to replace the dangerous shallows of competition that have brought us to the brink with a knowledge and sense of the small miracles of cooperation that have forged our natural world. The ubiquitous, lifelong partnerships between animals and plants, insects and fungi, fish and bacteria are an essential guide for a better future. Togetherness reveals the intimate connectedness of nature through stories of symbiosis. From the female wasp venturing deep inside a fig, and the intricate relationship between corals and the algae that sustain them, to the symbiotic gut microbes that influence our moods, Hooper explores how cooperation is fundamental to life and to protecting our shared future. The hope, the plan, is to change how we see the world, our place in it – and our obligation to it, so we can forge a symbiotic future. We can build nothing less than a symbiocene.

by Darby Saxbe

Darby Saxbe is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California who has conducted one of the world’s largest longitudinal studies on men’s brains as they become fathers. She should be in a great place “to shift the narrative by showing that great parents are made, not born” and to answer the question that some might consider it premature to celebrate fathers when our culture still does so little to support mothers. “I’d answer that parenthood is not a zero-sum game… Understanding the influence of fathers helps us build the tag team of adults who are cray about their kids. That, I hope, is a cause we can all champion,” she writes. It looks like a book for a deep read and a terrific addition to the increasing number of fatherhood books, like the excellent 2024 Father Time by anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

by Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao

What could be more fun than a counter-intuitive climate book? Psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and climate behaviour scientist Jiaying Zhao (both at the University of British Columbia, Canada) assembled a pile of what sound like too-good-to-be-true propositions. Take this: can you improve your happiness and wellbeing while also reducing your carbon footprint? Or, what if the most effective ways to fight climate change made you happy?��And suppose we could make ourselves, and our planet, happier at the same time? Dunn and Zhao have a point: if you like��the changes you make, you’re more likely to stick with them – and spread them across friend and family networks. So, you don’t have to become a vegan or give up flying:��sub chicken for beef, and take carry-on bags. Both make a decent dent in emissions at a lower personal cost. They also urge us to approach your emissions the way you (ideally) do your finances: strategically, thoughtfully and with the long-term firmly in mind. But above all, do something and do it joyfully. And more good news, data scientist Hannah Ritchie (author of Not the End of the World, a book stuffed with climate facts and hopeful solutions) approves. “Many would argue that this is too good to be true; Dunn and Zhao expertly show us that it is not,” she writes of the book.

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by Leroy Chiao with Victoria Bruce

What would you ask an astronaut if you could have lunch with them? Few people know how interstellar exploration feels better than Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut, former International Space Station commander and veteran of four space missions. He most recently served as commander and NASA science officer of Expedition 10 aboard the International Space Station (spending 229 days in space). Chiao is one of the first Asian-American astronauts, and, say his publishers, using his “unique perspective from flying with fellow American, Japanese and Russian professionals”, he can answer burning questions such as: what is the new space race, and who are the next generation of competitors? What is NASA working on these days? What feelings did you experience looking out at Earth from space? What does the future of space exploration look like? Will we ever make it to Mars? So, what would you ask over a three-course dinner?

by Brian Clegg

Could you accurately describe an electron, its function, genesis, discovery or future? If not, then enter Brian Clegg, with what looks like a handy refresher in the shape of a biography. Expect to hear everything from when the term was originally coined as a tentative name for the basic unit of electrical charge to the electron’s increasing centrality to our lives through electricity. Roger Highfield,��science director of The Science Museum, UK, reckons that in “34 brisk, brilliantly crafted chapters, he sweeps through centuries of discovery: essential reading for our electrified age”.

The best new popular science books of 2026

Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Flood

by Kojo Koram

As “the 20th-century distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drugs blur into incoherence”, The Next Fix by law professor and investigative journalist Kojo Koram is billed by one of its early reviewers as a guide to the new territory in which “yesterday’s banned substances are today’s wellness aids or pharmaceutical miracles”. Tricky territory indeed. Especially as it’s a bit of a no-brainer that the so-called War on Drugs will only be replaced by an approach based on the same old monopolies and exploitation that caused so many problems in the first place – from poverty to deforestation, pollution and loss of biodiversity. Koram tracks the tensions along a newly legalised frontier, exploring the possibilities of drug reform versus a new chapter in capitalism creating “a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies”.

��by Jessica Pykett

Data from facial emotion recognition, brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality, global emotion surveys and sentiment analysis seem to offer an extraordinary new terrain for scientific exploration. Emotion-sensing promises to decode and even to augment and control the very essence of human experience. But what if the science and technology of emotion measurement get emotions wrong? ��In��Governing Global Emotions, Jessica Pykett, professor of social and political geography and codirector of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing at the University of Birmingham, UK, describes how technologies create emotional data, how smart cities use sensors to monitor residents’ feelings and how global economies measure happiness. In an age of ever-increasing surveillance capitalism and the rise of neurocapitalism, that should make for an interesting read.

by Janet L. Jones

How much do we know about the psychology and neurology of one our companion animals, the charismatic horse? Somehow, say the publishers of A Horse’s World by Janet L. Jones, horses have been largely ignored by cognitive science even though the bond between horse and rider is every bit as strong as any other cross-species relationship. Neuroscientist and horse trainer Jones is up for producing an equine version of An Immense World��or Soul of an Octopus, through her own relationship with a horse called True North. Her account claims to be the first book of its kind to explore the fascinating science of how horses think, feel, learn and connect with their human companions, as Jones exposes common misconceptions that cause us to fault horses for “misbehaviours” that are normal prey-brain responses. She also explains, among many other features, how horses trade a human-style prefrontal cortex – capable of judgment, manipulation and complex strategic thinking – for powerful memory that supports excellent intelligence. Given the first MRI scan of an equine brain was not completed until 2019, there is still a vast deal to learn about equine neurology and neural physiology – and how to build trust with a creature whose internal world differs from our own.

by Louis Lefebvre, translated by Pablo Strauss

Just in case there are any lingering doubts about the cognitive capacity of birds, biologist and avian researcher Louis Lefebvre looks sure to dispel them in this book, which sets out to reveal how birds exhibit creativity, social learning and even cultural transmission, delving into the behaviours of everything from crows using cars as nutcrackers to cockatoos crafting tools. Blending decades of scientific research with anecdotes, Lefebvre derives an “innovation quotient” (like a human IQ) to measure and rank the innovation of a particular species. He answers questions about how a bird species spreads a new technique, why research on bird cognition is being used to train AI models and robots and what makes certain birds endlessly innovative, while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviours. Nicky Clayton, professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, has described the book as “an amazing avian adventure… Like a profound magic effect, there are hidden gems on every page, tailored to both the general public and the in-depth expert.”

by Beeban Kidron

What has Bridget Jones got to do with moves to fight back against the excesses of big tech? The two are united in the person of author Baroness Beeban Kidron, now a crossbench peer and campaigner in the UK’s second house, the House of Lords – and once a film director (Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason). Her book Users is being promoted as an insider’s guide to how politicians and policymakers have sold democracy to Silicon Valley, and what we need to do to take it back. Kidron takes us on a journey from the halls of Parliament and the UN to the White House and Silicon Valley. Through her encounters with specialist police officers, bereaved parents, lobbyists and tech bros, says the publisher, we witness the unchecked power of Big Tech, as they avoid rules and regulations, and capture governments that are meant to protect us. We see how the issue is not technology itself, but its use and abuse. How tools built to connect people are redeployed to divide, punish, distract, and control; while tech overlords come to own everything – but continue to be held responsible for nothing. In February, she told The Bookseller: “Users��is my answer to the hundreds of people who have contacted me feeling uncomfortable, overwhelmed or simply angry about technology – asking, ‘What can we do?’ My greatest wish is that readers find something in it that inspires them to act – in their homes, communities and workplaces – and to demand more from those in power.”

by Michael Handford

Michael Handford’s story sounds like it will be terrible, powerful and ultimately fascinating – probably in equal measure. He was an academic specialising in intercultural communication when he received a stage 4 throat cancer diagnosis at the age of 42 while living and working in Japan and the UK. According to his publisher, his book “examines how communication – whether with doctors, loved ones, or oneself – can shape the cancer experience”. Hanford even worked on devising his own metaphor for cancer, not caring for the more stereotypical ones involving battles. Now that’s a class act.

Togetherness
Rowan Hooper
(, UK, out 4th June; , US, out 18th August)

The best books are those that give you a new perspective, but�� by my colleague Rowan Hooper has given me something more than that – not just a new view, but a new way of seeing. In essence a book about symbiosis, Togetherness zooms from the inner workings of our cells all the way out to how our planet functions as a whole and back in again, revealing how biological cooperation underpins all life – and why Western science has largely failed to notice this for centuries.

Symbiosis is the kind of concept you learn at school, often with a too-neat-to-be-true definition and a few quirky illustrative examples – coral, say, or lichen. Both feature in Togetherness (plus plenty of extraordinary cases you won’t be familiar with), but Rowan makes it abundantly clear that symbiosis isn’t a freak occurrence confined to a few classic cases: it’s a rule of nature, occurring time and time again and everywhere you care to look.

How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun

Having demonstrated this, he then makes his passionate argument for how this revelation requires us to re-examine everything we know about the natural world. He traces our understanding of evolution through history, and how Charles Darwin’s dazzling fundamental insights on competition and survival have an overlooked counterpart in the tendency of unrelated living things to come together. Rowan – as big a fan of Darwin as I’ve ever met – treads the line carefully and shows how you can have both.

In the thrilling final third of the book, Rowan explores all the environmental ills of today, many of which are the result of us neglecting to consider how different species live and work together. He speaks to the scientists trying to figure out how, in turn, we could use symbiosis to right these wrongs.

I’ve worked closely with Rowan, New Scientist’s podcast editor, for over a decade, so I can’t pretend that this is an objective review of his third book. But listeners of our podcast The World, The Universe And Us will know that Rowan is someone who loves to dive into big ideas, and Togetherness manages to be both hugely ambitious in scope and also very enjoyable.

His plea for us all to adopt an ecological world view, one underpinned by the insights of symbiosis, is deeply rooted in his earlier career as a scientist, but Rowan’s many journalistic titbits – from what Karl Marx thought of Darwin to Carl Sagan’s opening chat-up line to Lynn Margulis – make it really fun.

Spirit of Antarctica expedition cruise

Join Rowan Hooper on a journey into one of the most remote and pristine environments on Earth guided by a team of seasoned experts, from naturalists to historians, who will share their knowledge of this extraordinary region.

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