A decade-long study led by Penguin Watch¹, at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, has uncovered a record shift in the breeding season of Antarctic penguins, likely in response to climate change. These changes threaten to disrupt penguins’ access to food and increase interspecies competition. The results have been published today (20 January - World Penguin Awareness Day) in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

Animals are changing their habits in the face of warming. New research suggests that many of them are still hanging on and even flourishing. That’s the main takeaway of a new analysis of data on 73 species ranging from songbirds to water snakes published in Nature Communications, looking at what makes animals worldwide better equipped to survive the climate crisis.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford has shown that the shape and orientation of coastlines significantly influenced extinction patterns for animals living in the shallow oceans during the last 540 million years. In particular, animals living on convoluted or east-west orientated coastlines (such as those found in the Mediterranean and Gulf of Mexico today) were more likely to go extinct than those living on north-south orientated coastlines.

The findings, published today in Science, provide new insight towards understanding patterns of biodiversity distribution throughout Earth history to the present day, and highlight which modern species may be more at risk of extinction due to climate change.