Since the beginning of time, Earth has created life and then wiped out most of it in catastrophic, ultra-destructive moments.

New research reveals more information about the first and oldest of the 'big five' extinctions. Around 85% of marine species, most of which lived in shallow oceans near continents, disappeared during ...

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 ...

It’s sad when living things go extinct. That means they’re gone forever. I think about extinct unicorns all. the. time. My friend Jodi Rosso told me that a mass extinction is when a huge number of ...

The length of time necessary to recover from a mass extinction may seem like a problem from the past, but a team of Penn State researchers is investigating recovery from the second largest extinction ...

The once very successful group of marine arthropods called trilobites were hit hard by the Ordovician mass extinction and never fully recovered until going extinct 200 million years later. At the end ...

Marine fossil specimens unearthed in northern Portugal are filling a gap in understanding evolution during the Middle Ordovician period. A clutch of marine fossil specimens unearthed in northern ...

The second-largest extinction in the Earth’s history, the killing of two-thirds of all species, may have been caused by ultraviolet radiation from the sun after gamma rays destroyed the Earth’s ozone ...

At least two mass extinction events in Earth's history were likely caused by the "devastating" effects of nearby supernova explosions, a new study suggests. Researchers at Keele University say these ...

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 ...