About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

One of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions wiped out most ocean life during a sudden global ice age. From the ruins, jawed vertebrates survived, diversified, and transformed the course of evolution.

Scientists have long treated mass extinctions as events locked deep in the fossil record. That framing now feels less distant. New research points to patterns that resemble earlier biological ...

Discover how the first mass extinction put jawed fishes on the map, species that would later come to dominate animal life on ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth nearly wiped out life in the oceans. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

Sharks might be the all time bullet-dodging champions. They’ve been around for about 450 million years, longer than trees, longer than the rings of Saturn, and longer than most of the other life on ...

Mass extinction events represent intervals of abrupt, large‐scale loss of biodiversity that have repeatedly reshaped life on Earth. These crises are commonly linked to dramatic environmental ...

Supernova destroying planet, illustration. A rocky planet lies in the wake of its star, which has just gone supernova. The explosion shatters the planet. A complete census of massive stars in our part ...

Everyone knows that dinosaurs are extinct, and most people have some idea about how it might have occurred. But the exact periods in history when it happened are less well known. Was it a single ...

In fact, the last great extinction event in the history of life on Earth could be our fault. Human activities such as habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, and overexploitation of species ...

The Silurian Period is characterised by a dynamic interplay between environmental stressors and biotic turnover, with extinction events and carbon isotope excursions (CIEs) representing pivotal ...