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 ...

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 ...

Mass extinction events throughout Earth’s history are characterized as significant disruptions to life on the planet. There have been five major extinction events that have fundamentally changed how ...

“One of the great mysteries has been the survival and flourishing of a major group of amphibians called the temnospondyls,” Aamir Mehmood, a study co-author and evolutionary biologist at the ...

Deposits in Morocco associated with the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction, 201.6 million years ago. Red sediments in many locations around the world contain Triassic-era fossils. The white band on top ...

A mass extinction event that brought about the rise of the dinosaurs more than 200 million years ago was believed to be caused by the planet’s warming. Now, scientists at Columbia University say ...

The Triassic-Jurassic Extinction, 201.6 million years ago, has been considered by some to have been a fairly slow-burn event, driven by rising temperatures and ocean acidification. A new study says it ...

The mass extinction that ended the Permian geological epoch, 252 million years ago, wiped out most animals living on Earth. Huge volcanoes erupted, releasing 100,000 billion metric tons of carbon ...

Everyone knows that dinosaurs are extinct, and most people have some idea about how it might have occurred. But the exact periods in history when it happened are less well known. Was it a single ...