At some point in the deep past, humans may have come frighteningly close to disappearing altogether. Here’s what we know, ...

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

Imagine someone digs you up in 15,000 years and discovers what you had for lunch the day that you died. That’s more or less ...

Life on Earth has been knocked flat more than once, yet the rock record keeps revealing how quickly complex ecosystems can roar back. The latest jaw dropping fossil trove from southern China captures ...

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

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

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 ...

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

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.

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

A rapid climate collapse during the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction devastated ocean life and reshuffled Earth’s ecosystems. In the aftermath, jawed vertebrates gained an unexpected edge by surviving ...