In 2016, paleontologist David DeMar Jr. was searching for fossils in northeastern Montana when he discovered a small, broken ...

The term “mass extinction” conjures up apocalyptic images of the world coming to an end, but a massive event like this can be a much slower process than many people realize. By definition, a mass ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A skeleton of a Dodo. - Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Humans have wiped out hundreds of species — with many more on the brink or ...

About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, a large proportion of species on Earth rapidly became extinct.

Around 540 million years ago, Earth's biosphere underwent a pivotal transformation, shifting from a microbe-dominated world to one teeming with animal life, as nearly all major animal phyla appeared ...

In school, we learned about the asteroid that wiped out an estimated 76% of all creatures. Scientists now call this the fifth mass extinction. You’re reading that correctly: throughout Earth’s history ...

A fire-bellied newt (Cynops ensicauda) photographed on Amami Island (Japan). A recent study suggested that the extinction of this and other genera was part of a mass extinction event that threatens ...

A pair of Sacabambaspis fish, around 35 cm in length, which had distinct, forward-facing eyes and an armored head. No fossils of animals like Sacabambaspis from after the Late Ordovician Mass ...

Around 250 million years ago, one of Earth's largest known volcanic events set off The Great Dying: the planet's worst mass extinction event. The eruptions spewed large amounts of greenhouse gases ...

The study of extinction dynamics in the fossil record integrates patterns of biodiversity loss with environmental and biotic drivers across geological time. Fluctuations in global diversity often ...