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 ...

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 ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. 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 ...

Almost all life on land and in the ocean was wiped out during "The Great Dying," a mass extinction event at the end of the Permian Era about 250 million years ago. New evidence suggests that the Great ...

Earth has never stood still. Over its 4.5 billion years of history, our planet has been reshaped by different cataclysms and climate shifts. The atmosphere went through several changes, oceans froze ...

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

(CNN) — Around 252 million years ago, life on Earth suffered its most catastrophic blow to date: a mass extinction event known as the “Great Dying” that wiped out around 90% of life. What followed has ...

A spectacular fossil trove on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen shows that marine life made a stunning comeback after Earth’s greatest extinction. Tens of thousands of fossils reveal fully aquatic ...