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 ...

Backed by a National Science Foundation grant of more than $500,000, Pfeifer, the lead principal investigator, and a team of ...

Earth has a long and dramatic history, and one recurring theme is extinction. Did you know that over the last 500 million years, our planet experienced five major mass extinction events? These events ...

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 ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

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 ...

One of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions wiped out most ocean life during a sudden global ice age. From the ruins, jawed vertebrates survived, diversified, and transformed the course of evolution.

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