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

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

A devastating ice age wiped out most marine life, yet new research reveals how this ancient disaster unexpectedly paved the ...

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

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

The extinction of dinosaurs had a significant impact on the development of plants, a new study has shown. Experts at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in the cities of ...

Robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. At the start of the simulation, a biped ...

This graph plots extinction rates of marine animal families over the last 600 million years. The shaded band indicates the normal range of extinction rates, known as "background extinction." The five ...

With the extinction of large, non-flying dinosaurs 66 million years ago, large herbivores were missing on Earth for the subsequent 25 million years. Since plants and herbivorous animals influence each ...

Warnings that humanity is heading toward its own disappearance have shifted from the fringes of science fiction into mainstream research and public debate. Instead of vague prophecies, scientists now ...