Fossilized skeletons and shells clearly show how evolution and extinction unfolded over the past half a billion years, but a new analysis extends the chart of life to nearly 2 billion years ago.

This graph plots extinction rates of marine animal families over the last 600 million years. The shaded band indicates the normal range of extinction rates, known as "background extinction." ...

Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. Species constantly go extinct, and every species that ...

Therefore, natural selection increases the relative abundance of defectors and drives cooperators to extinction ... game occupy the vertices of a graph. The edges denote links between individuals ...

In a new study from Northern Arizona University, researchers delved into the relationship between their extinction and the evolution of fruit. They explored a few key moments in the planet’s ...

There’s nothing like a big mass extinction to open up ecological niches and clear out the competition, accelerating evolution for some lucky survivors. Or is there? A new study suggests that the ...

That inflexibility could help explain why diving birds have an elevated extinction rate compared ... Josh Tyler and Jane Younger investigated the evolution of diving in Aequorlitornithes, a ...