Our planet’s first known mass extinction happened about 440 million years ago. Species diversity on Earth had been increasing ...

View Full Profile. Learn about our Editorial Policies. Most scientists agree that five events in Earth’s history qualify as “mass extinctions”—defined as events where more than three-quarters of ...

today’s crisis “does not yet qualify as a mass extinction in the paleontological sense of the Big Five.” But holding such a high standard for an event to qualify as a mass extinction doesn’t allow a ...

Deaths of nearby massive stars may have played a significant role in triggering at least two mass extinction events in ...

known as "background extinction." The five peaks show the "Big Five" mass extinction events, when extinction rates sharply exceeded background rates. These occurred at the end of the Ordivician ...

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 ...

Specifically, the findings support the hypothesis that supernovae could have triggered two of the so-called "big five" mass extinctions: those at the end of the Ordovician Period, some 445 million ...

For decades scientists have dubbed several of our planet's largest mass extinction events - including 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs - the 'Big Five'.

The researchers compared their model to the magnitude of Earth’s “Big Five” mass extinctions. The illustration above indicates the percentage of biodiversity lost during each event (left).

The Jurassic Period is one of the three prehistoric geological periods of the Mesozoic Era. It spans from 145 million to 201 ...

the experts found that their research supported the theory that a supernova explosion was responsible for both the late Devonian and Ordovician extinction events—two of the five known mass ...

Since life emerged on our planet, there have been five mass extinctions. Sometimes these ... "Is there anything we can do to stop it?" Fed delivers big inflation surprise even as it holds rates ...