During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots ...

A massive ice age wiped out ocean life 445 million years ago, reshaping ecosystems and setting the stage for jawed fish ...

The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction event, marking the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods approximately 66 million years ago, stands as one of the most profound ...

A rapid climate collapse during the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction devastated ocean life and reshuffled Earth’s ecosystems.

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

Robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. At the start of the simulation, a biped ...

Beyond its implications for artificial intelligence, the research supports the idea that mass extinctions actually speed up evolution by unleashing new creativity in adaptations. Computer scientists ...

With the extinction of large, non-flying dinosaurs 66 million years ago, large herbivores were missing on Earth for the subsequent 25 million years. Since plants and herbivorous animals influence each ...

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 extinction of dinosaurs had a significant impact on the development of plants, a new study has shown. Experts at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in the cities of ...