When considering mass extinctions, people often think of the asteroid strike that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs. But life on Earth has experienced many extinction events. Now, a trove of fossils ...

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

The fossils offer a rare glimpse into a cataclysmic event that brought a sudden end to the greatest explosion of life in our ...

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.

Mass extinction events represent intervals of abrupt, large‐scale loss of biodiversity that have repeatedly reshaped life on Earth. These crises are commonly linked to dramatic environmental ...

Sixty-six million years ago, the dinosaurs had a really bad day when a colossal asteroid impact spurred their extinction. But ...

Speciation and extinction are the twin engines that have sculpted the diversity of life on Earth. Speciation, the process by which new species arise from ancestral populations, is driven by a mixture ...

Despite Earth's most devastating mass extinction wiping out over 80% of marine life and half of land species, a group of early reptiles called archosauromorphs not only survived but thrived, venturing ...

The impact of the asteroid in present-day Yucatan wiped out almost all life on Earth. It recovered faster than previously ...

Contributed by Kea Giles, Managing Editor, GeologyBoulder, Colo., USA: Mass extinctions are extremely catastrophic events on Earth. Throughout Earth's ...

Tens of thousands of years ago, the first wave of a worldwide tsunami now known as the “Sixth Extinction” swept across the ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Sixty-six million years ago, the dinosaurs had a really bad day when a colossal asteroid impact spurred their extinction. But even though those reptilian megafauna get all the ...