Scientists have long treated mass extinctions as events locked deep in the fossil record. That framing now feels less distant. New research points to patterns that resemble earlier biological ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth nearly wiped out life in the oceans. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

A massive ice age wiped out ocean life 445 million years ago, reshaping ecosystems and setting the stage for jawed fish ...

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 ...

During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots ...

The collapse of tropical forests during Earth’s most catastrophic extinction event was the primary cause of the prolonged global warming which followed, according to new research. The Permian–Triassic ...

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 ...

A rapid climate collapse during the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction devastated ocean life and reshuffled Earth’s ecosystems.

The West Texas desert has a surprising feature: a prehistoric ocean reef. There is a surprising natural wonder in the middle of the vast West Texas desert: a prehistoric ocean reef built from the ...

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

Guryul ravine in Kashmir preserves the world's clearest geological record of the "Great Dying", Earth's most devastating mass ...