Stock image of a volcano (main) and dinosaurs (inset). The mass extinction just before the dinosaurs took over may have been caused by extreme cold rather than extreme warmth like originally thought.

New research points to volcanic activity as a major cause of prehistoric mass extinctions. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

The theory gained even more steam when scientists were able to link the extinction event ... one paper suggesting the volcanoes played a supporting role in the dinosaurs’ demise by causing ...

This, the researchers say, suggests that asteroid contributed little to past extinction events aside from the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. And even then, because volcanoes were also highly active ...

The ancient volcanoes in that area ... Among the most significant mysteries of the end-Triassic extinction, however, is why dinosaurs and pterosaurs fared so much better than so many of their ...

Along with carbon dioxide, volcanoes spew sulfur particles ... that ensued during the end-Triassic mass extinction, Olsen and colleagues say. Dinosaurs might then have been able to spread rapidly ...

Dinosaurs are the extinct relatives of birds that roamed the lands and seas of ancient Earth. They first appeared around 240 ...

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

Volcanic rock is formed when volcanoes erupt ... it lines up with when scientists think dinosaurs, and lots of other species, became extinct. The Deccan Plateau is just one piece of the evidence ...

They wanted to learn how much fluorine and sulfur were burped into the atmosphere as volcanoes spewed ... prior to the extinction of the dinosaurs," McGill University Professor Don Baker, who ...

The dinosaurs—besides the ancestors of modern birds, of course—went extinct 66 million years ago, after a massive asteroid slammed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula at the ...

An asteroid strike 66 million years ago caused millions of species to go extinct—including many mollusks. By studying the ...