At some point in the deep past, humans may have come frighteningly close to disappearing altogether. Here’s what we know, ...

For decades, the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs has stood as a symbol of total planetary devastation. But hidden within the chaos it unleashed was the seed of a biological rebirth. In ...

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

One of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions wiped out most ocean life during a sudden global ice age. From the ruins, jawed vertebrates survived, diversified, and transformed the course of evolution.

In a new study in Geology, researchers calculated how long it took for novel single-celled marine species to appear after the asteroid impact, and it’s surprisingly fast.

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

The extinction of the largest dinosaurs to walk the Earth may have played a critical role in creating an environment that helped fruits evolve, thereby indirectly shaping the evolution of our own ...

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 ...