Imagine an asteroid striking Earth and wiping out most of the human population. Even if some lucky people survived the impact ...

At some point in the deep past, humans may have come frighteningly close to disappearing altogether. Here’s what we know, ...

Learn how social connections may influence extinction risk in some wildlife species.

The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction event, marking the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods approximately 66 million years ago, stands as one of the most profound ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, and shallow seas shrank fast.

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 ...

One of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions wiped out most ocean life during a sudden global ice age. From the ruins, jawed vertebrates survived, diversified, and transformed the course of evolution.

Mass extinctions are extremely catastrophic events on Earth. Throughout Earth's evolutionary history, numerous mass ...

Tens of thousands of years ago, the first wave of a worldwide tsunami now known as the “Sixth Extinction” swept across the ...

The fossils offer a rare glimpse into a cataclysmic event that brought a sudden end to the greatest explosion of life in our ...