Scientists have long treated mass extinctions as events locked deep in the fossil record. That framing now feels less distant ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth nearly wiped out life in the oceans. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

Discover how the first mass extinction put jawed fishes on the map, species that would later come to dominate animal life on ...

Scientists have speculated for years that the world is coming up on its sixth mass extinction, when a majority of the Earth’s creatures become extinct. But a couple of Virginia Tech researchers are ...

Quick Take Six animal species, including the slender-billed curlew and Christmas Island shrew, were confirmed extinct in 2025 ...

Mass extinction events represent intervals of abrupt, large‐scale loss of biodiversity that have repeatedly reshaped life on Earth. These crises are commonly linked to dramatic environmental ...

Sharks might be the all time bullet-dodging champions. They’ve been around for about 450 million years, longer than trees, longer than the rings of Saturn, and longer than most of the other life on ...

The Jurassic Period is one of the three prehistoric geological periods of the Mesozoic Era. It spans from 145 million to 201 million years ago. This period was preceded by the Triassic Period and ...

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 ...

Supernova destroying planet, illustration. A rocky planet lies in the wake of its star, which has just gone supernova. The explosion shatters the planet. A complete census of massive stars in our part ...