Earth has experienced five documented mass extinctions to date. With the sixth extinction around the corner, scientists are looking to the past to try and understand how life continues on after one of ...

A wave of new research is forcing paleontologists to reconsider a basic question about life on Earth: when did the first mass ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Sharks might be the all time bullet-dodging champions. They’ve been around for about 450 million years, longer than trees, longer ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Even bivalves looked different during the time of the dinosaurs, as these fossils of an ultra-fortified oyster, left, and armored ...

A quarter of a billion years ago, long before dinosaurs or mammals evolved, the predator Dinogorgon, whose skull is shown here, hunted floodplains in the heart of today's South Africa. In less than a ...

Many of their descendants—modern birds—are currently threatened by extinction, with hundreds of species at risk due to human activity. This article explores the major extinction events that influenced ...

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 ...

A pair of Sacabambaspis fish, around 35 cm in length, which had distinct, forward-facing eyes and an armored head. No fossils of animals like Sacabambaspis from after the Late Ordovician Mass ...

Around 250 million years ago, one of Earth’s largest known volcanic events set off The Great Dying: the planet’s worst mass extinction event.... How did these species survive mass extinction events?

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 ...