Tag: Extinction

Biggest Mass Extinction Researchers say mercury buried in ancient rock provides the strongest evidence yet that volcanoes caused the biggest mass extinction in the history...

It takes at least 10 million years for life to fully recover after a mass extinction, a speed limit for the recovery of species...

Roughly 430 million years ago, during the Earth's Silurian Period, global oceans were experiencing changes that would seem eerily familiar today. Melting polar ice...

Scientists are peeking into ancient oceans to unravel the complexities of mass extinctions, past and future. A new examination of Earth's largest extinction by...

Little life could endure the Earth-spanning cataclysm known as the Great Dying, but plants may have suffered its wrath long before many animal counterparts,...

This illustration shows the percentage of marine animals that went extinct at the end of the Permian era by latitude, from...

New research disputes a long-held view that our earliest tool-bearing ancestors contributed to the demise of large mammals in Africa over the last several...

During the late Cretaceous period, more than 65 million years ago, birds belonging to hundreds of different species flitted around the dinosaurs and through...

We humans are exterminating animal and plant species so quickly that nature's built-in defence mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. An Aarhus-led research team calculated...

Using the fossil record to accurately estimate the timing and pace of past mass extinctions is no easy task, and a new study highlights...

A new study could help explain the driving force behind the largest mass extinction in the history of earth, known as the End-Permian Extinction. The...

Fossil records tell us that the first macroscopic animals appeared on Earth about 575 million years ago. Twenty-four million years later, the diversity of...

The lengths that some males go to attract a mate can pay off in the short-term. But according to a new study from scientists...

On a certain level, extinction is all about energy. Animals move over their surroundings like pacmen, chomping up resources to fuel their survival. If...

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have discovered that the mass extinction seen in plant species caused by the onset of a drier climate...

Black rhinos, red wolves, whooping cranes: the global list of endangered species grows every year to the point where some researchers say we're witnessing...

Mammals only started being active in the daytime after non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out about 66 million years ago (mya), finds a new study...

One of the most exciting discoveries that paleontologists can make is finding the causal relationship between the extinction of ancient creatures and the environmental...

Fossil records near the lost Gondwanides mountains show that the Permian-Triassic extinction started 1 million years prior to what was previously believed. Millions of years...

Two of Earth's five mass extinction events -- times when more than half of the world's species died -- resulted in the survival of...