The Silurian Period is characterised by a dynamic interplay between environmental stressors and biotic turnover, with extinction events and carbon isotope excursions (CIEs) representing pivotal ...

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

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 ...

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

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 ...

About 66 million years ago – perhaps on a downright unlucky day in May – an asteroid smashed into our planet. Even groups that weathered the catastrophe, such as mammals, fishes and flowering plants, ...

A mass extinction event is a term used to describe a large-scale event that wipes out species. It is usually not a short, one-time incident but rather something that occurs over thousands or millions ...

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 ...

Almost all life on land and in the ocean was wiped out during "The Great Dying," a mass extinction event at the end of the Permian Era about 250 million years ago. New evidence suggests that the Great ...

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 ...

A new theory suggests depletion of trace elements in the oceans was a factor in three major mass extinction events in the past 600 million years, according to new research led by Flinders University's ...