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

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

Farther back in our planet’s history, volcanic eruptions, rapid climate change, and plummeting oxygen levels have caused at least four additional mass extinctions, with smaller pulses of biodiversity ...

The mass extinction that wiped out nearly all life on Earth just before the dinosaurs evolved may have been caused by a global temperature drop rather than a rapidly warming climate. The End Triassic ...

(CNN) — A cataclysm engulfed the planet some 252 million years ago, wiping out more than 90% of all life. Known as the Great Dying, the mass extinction that ended the Permian geological period was the ...

If we continue on our current trajectory, the sixth mass extinction is inevitable and the times we're living through now will be part of that geological period. When you purchase through links on our ...

For the last three years evidence has been building that the impact of a comet or asteroid triggered the biggest mass extinction in Earth history, but new research from a team headed by a University ...

The end-Permian mass extinction was the deadliest event in Earth’s history. Also called the Great Dying, it is thought to have nearly wiped out all life on Earth 252 million years ago. Yet, earlier ...

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 ...

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.