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 ...

A chilling new assessment suggests our planet is hurtling towards an unprecedented loss of life, with human activity squarely ...

The "Big Five" mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic Eon have long attracted significant attention from the geoscience ...

Putting an end to a mass extinction sounds like an impossible task, but some researchers argue that doing so would be setting ...

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.

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Life on our planet has experienced many mass extinctions over its 4.5 billion years. Scientists see evidence for at least five major episodes that eradicated creatures great and small. And many ...