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 ...

Scientists have finally cracked a long-standing mystery about squid and cuttlefish evolution by analyzing newly sequenced ...

A mass extinction event is a term used to describe a large-scale event that wipes out species. It is usually not a short, one-time incident but rather something that occurs over thousands or millions ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Some 252 million years ago, almost all life on Earth disappeared. Known as the Permian–Triassic mass extinction – or the Great Dying – this was the most catastrophic of the five mass extinction events ...

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 ...

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?

Just over half a billion years ago, Earth was rocked by a global mass extinction event, a dramatic interruption of the Cambrian explosion of life on Earth. What happened next, in the direct aftermath ...

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 ...

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 ...