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, ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

The Late Devonian represents a critical interval in Earth’s history, marked by a profound restructuring of marine biodiversity and a series of mass extinction events. This period witnessed extensive ...

(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 ...

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 say these super-powerful blasts ...

The Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, occurring approximately 66 million years ago, represents one of the most dramatic biotic crises in Earth’s history. It is marked by the abrupt disappearance ...

Whether a species has just freshly emerged, or it has been around for millions of years does not dictate its vulnerability. This has been the assumption of an old debate on whether species' age plays ...