Earth's worst mass extinctions occurred when environmental change outpaced evolution, revealing a pattern spanning 450 ...

The study of extinction dynamics in the fossil record integrates patterns of biodiversity loss with environmental and biotic drivers across geological time. Fluctuations in global diversity often ...

couple of Brachiosaurus altithorax and a flock of Pterosaurs in a scenic Late Jurassic landscape© dottedhippo/iStock via Getty Images The Jurassic Period is one of the three prehistoric geological ...

Scientists have made a surprising discovery that sheds new light on the role that oceanic deoxygenation (anoxia) played in one of the most devastating extinction events in Earth's history. Their ...

A mass extinction event is a term used to describe a large-scale event that wipes out species. It is usually not a short, one-time incident but rather something that occurs over thousands or millions ...

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?

(CNN) — No species lasts forever — extinction is part of the evolution of life. But at least five times, a biological catastrophe has engulfed the planet, killing off the vast majority of species from ...

Most people think of crocodilians as living fossils—stubbornly unchanged, prehistoric relics that have ruled the world's swampiest corners for millions of years. But their evolutionary history tells a ...

As life on Earth rapidly expanded a little over 500 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion, Earth had tectonic plates slowly crashing into each other, building mountains and starting a series ...

Last year, hiking in Morocco’s eastern Atlas Mountains, I found an ammonite, a fossil of those spiral-shape cephalopods that to many symbolize paleontology itself. The fossilization process had turned ...