This video looks at the deadliest disasters in human and planetary history, from famines and plagues to asteroid impacts, ...

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 ...

Exploding stars in near-solar space may have triggered at least two mass extinction events in Earth's history. An analysis of the frequency of supernova explosions in the Milky Way, led by ...

The resulting extinction decimated animal groups, like archaeocyathids (reef-building marine sponges) and hyoliths (animals with small conical shells). "It's unusual to point to a tectonic cause for ...

Scientists trace the dinosaur-killing asteroid to a rare meteorite, shedding new light on Earth's biggest extinction event.

A new Stanford-led study offers the clearest picture yet of how some ocean life survived our planet's biggest mass extinction ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Even bivalves looked different during the time of the dinosaurs, as these fossils of an ultra-fortified oyster, left, and armored ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Life on Earth is anything but predictable. For evidence, ...

couple of Brachiosaurus altithorax and a flock of Pterosaurs in a scenic Late Jurassic landscape© dottedhippo/iStock via Getty Images The Jurassic Period is one of the three prehistoric geological ...

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.... How did these species survive mass extinction events?

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 ...