Surprising new fossil evidence undermines the idea that there was ever a mass extinction on land – and may force us to reframe the current biodiversity crisis ...

Around 66 million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid hit Earth, triggering the extinction of three-quarters of all living ...

The Ordovician Period was around 485 to 444 million years ago and had a thriving ecosystem beneath the water, before fauna ...

Extinction is not exclusive to dinosaurs. Our planet has gone through at least five periods of mass extinction, with the planet likely in a sixth wave of mass extinction–this one, driven by humans.

Of the five mass extinctions, the Permian-Triassic is the only one that wiped out large numbers of insect species. Marine ecosystems took four to eight million years to recover. (Find out more ...

Researchers have enough data from the fossil record going back just over half a billion years to identify five such mass extinction events, and many scientists believe we’re in the middle of a sixth.

While the causes of the “big five” mass extinctions varied, understanding what happened during these dramatic chapters in Earth’s history — and what emerged in the aftermath of these ...

Over hundreds of millions of years, the planet has had five mass extinctions, and in time life has recovered. The process of recovery has been studied far less than the extinction events ...

The first of the Big Five mass extinctions transpired about 445 million years ago, marking the boundary between the Ordovician and Silurian periods back when fish and land plants were still ...