Investigating the 'overkill' hypothesis, this piece explores how human-wildlife conflict may have driven megafaunal ...

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

This lineage was widespread and abundant in the Late Cretaceous, but just a few species survive today off the coasts of Australia. If you’re an animal living through a mass extinction, it’s best to be ...

Humans have wiped out hundreds of species — with many more on the brink or experiencing large declines in population. Some scientists have argued that we have entered a “sixth mass extinction” event ...

(CNN) — A cataclysm engulfed the planet some 252 million years ago, wiping out more than 90% of all life. Known as the Great Dying, the mass extinction that ended the Permian geological period was the ...

Around 540 million years ago, Earth's biosphere underwent a pivotal transformation, shifting from a microbe-dominated world to one teeming with animal ...

A fire-bellied newt (Cynops ensicauda) on Amami Island in Japan. Previously thought to be extinct, the newt and others in its genera are still alive. (John J. Wiens/University of Arizona) (CN) — For ...

ANN ARBOR—Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began. The fossil record ...

The idea of a creeping mass extinction has served as one of the scary subplots of our ongoing climate drama. For decades, scientists have warned that we may be on the cusp of, or already entering, the ...

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 ...

Learn how microscopic fossils reveal that tiny seafloor organisms were already feeding and recycling nutrients soon after one ...