The collapse of tropical forests during Earth's most catastrophic extinction event was the primary cause of the prolonged global warming which followed, according to new research. The Permian–Triassic ...

A wave of new research is forcing paleontologists to reconsider a basic question about life on Earth: when did the first mass extinction actually happen? Three studies published across Nature, Science ...

Waves of extinction have ripped through life on Earth over and over again during its long history. The non-avian dinosaurs were the last to feel the burn, 66 million years ago, but there have been ...

Mass extinction events are defined by a 75% loss in total species. These events can take tens of thousands to several million years. Experts are alarmed at today's "unprecedented" population abundance ...

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

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. (Dawid Adam Iurino/PaleoFactory/Sapienza University of Rome) For the first 280 million years of animal life on Earth, slow-living ...

A spectacular fossil trove on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen shows that marine life made a stunning comeback after Earth’s greatest extinction. Tens of thousands of fossils reveal fully aquatic ...

Since its formation approximately 4.5 billion years ago, Earth has endured five mass extinctions, where roughly 75 percent of the planet's species disappeared within 2.8 million years - merely a blink ...

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 ...

Earth responded to its most severe past warming event by evolving a new and bizarre type of photosynthesis that allowed a group of primitive plants to survive. Research led by the University of Leeds ...

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 ...

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 ...