Scientists have long treated mass extinctions as events locked deep in the fossil record. That framing now feels less distant ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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

Everyone knows that dinosaurs are extinct, and most people have some idea about how it might have occurred. But the exact periods in history when it happened are less well known. Was it a single ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...