Our planet’s first known mass extinction happened about 440 million years ago. Species diversity on Earth had been increasing over a period of roughly 30 million years, but that would come to a halt ...

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 ...

Earth has a long and dramatic history, and one recurring theme is extinction. Did you know that over the last 500 million years, our planet experienced five major mass extinction events? These events ...

Over the course of Earth’s history, life has been decimated by cataclysmic events, each one leaving an indelible mark on the planet’s biodiversity. For millions of years, creatures that once thrived ...

Erin Saupe receives funding from the Leverhulme Prize and NERC grant NE/V011405/1. Cooper Malanoski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that ...

Last year, hiking in Morocco’s eastern Atlas Mountains, I found an ammonite, a fossil of those spiral-shape cephalopods that to many symbolize paleontology itself. The fossilization process had turned ...

Violent supernovas may have caused two of Earth’s largest mass extinctions that have never been completely explained, according to a theory put forward in new research.During the final stages of a ...

(CNN) — Humans have wiped out more than 100 species — with many more on the brink or experiencing large declines in population. Some scientists have argued that we have entered a “sixth mass ...