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 ...

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

(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 ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Stewart Edie, Smithsonian Institution (THE CONVERSATION) About 66 million years ago – ...

The planet is on the precipice of the sixth mass extinction event. Unlike previous mass extinctions caused by natural events such as asteroid collisions, volcanic activity, and climate change, the ...

Around 250 million years ago, one of Earth’s largest known volcanic events set off The Great Dying: the planet’s worst mass extinction event.... How did these species survive mass extinction events?

Mass extinctions are extremely catastrophic events on Earth. Throughout Earth's evolutionary history, numerous mass ...

Violent supernovas may have caused two of Earth’s largest mass extinctions that have never been completely explained, according to a theory put forward in new research.During the final stages of a ...

The Jurassic Period is one of the three prehistoric geological periods of the Mesozoic Era. It spans from 145 million to 201 million years ago. This period was preceded by the Triassic Period and ...

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

We may not be living through Earth’s sixth mass extinction event ­­— at least not yet. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis of plant and animal extinctions published September 4 in PLOS Biology.

Mass extinction events throughout Earth’s history are characterized as significant disruptions to life on the planet. There ...