A wave of new research is forcing paleontologists to reconsider a basic question about life on Earth: when did the first mass ...

Waves of extinction have ripped through life on Earth over and over again during its long history. The non-avian dinosaurs ...

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 West Texas desert has a surprising feature: a prehistoric ocean reef. There is a surprising natural wonder in the middle of the vast West Texas desert: a prehistoric ocean reef built from the ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Sharks might be the all time bullet-dodging champions. They’ve been around for about 450 million years, longer than trees, longer ...

"Specifically, the impact of their extinction may not just be observable by the disappearance of their fossils in the rock record, but also by changes in the sediments themselves." Dr. Weaver says the ...

The collapse of tropical forests during Earth’s most catastrophic extinction event was the primary cause of the prolonged global warming which followed, according to new research. The Permian–Triassic ...

Simultaneous explosions of stars, called supernovae, may have led to one of Earth's mass extinctions 359 million years ago, according to new research. Several global extinction events occurred during ...

UC College of Arts and Sciences Professor Thomas Algeo has been studying the planet's five major mass extinctions since the Ordovician Period, when global sea levels were much higher than today. In a ...

Discover the untold stories of Earth's mass extinctions through NBC's new series Surviving Earth, premiering June 4. Get a ...