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A profound drought has delayed spring in the southwest, and claret cup is one of the first cacti to flower in spring.

Plant communities are usually nicknamed for the most dominant species, such as a ponderosa pine community or a pinyon-juniper woodland. Mat saltbush, also called matscale, communities live on such harsh soils that they are sometimes the only species in in the community.

The Anthropocene epoch is a unit of geological time in which humans exert a dominant influence on climate and the environment, but we have not reached consensus on its starting point.

More than 1,500 fossil footprints allow you to follow dinosaurs as they walked along a lakeshore 150 million years ago. The dinosaur tracksite, the largest in North America, is beside the Purgatoire River in Picketwire Canyon south of La Junta.

On soils containing gold, silky phacelia is protected by gold, cyanide and even some arsenic. On soils devoid of gold, it is protected by cyanide.

Some species of plant, such as death camas, include toxins in nectar and pollen, presenting a bedeviling paradox. Why attract pollinators and then kill them?

Analyses of DNA from turkey bones at archeological sites and from modern samples of wild turkeys throughout their range indicate that the domesticated birds in Central Mexico and the domesticated birds from the Southwest are distinctly different.

Although tumbleweeds were familiar icons of the West, they were not native to the West, nor were they growing around the early western towns when they were established.

A comparison of the control and reduced sand leaves showed that removing sand doubled the damage by a variety of insect and snail herbivores. Leaves with added sand had less damage than the control group. Clearly, snail and insect herbivory is reduced by increasing levels of sand on leaves and stems.

It is comfortable to expect that wilderness areas will remain unchanged forever, but that is a naïve notion inappropriate to our times.