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

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

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

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

After all, animals go extinct regularly on geological timescales, but this mass extinction is largely human-driven. "Mutilating the tree of life is changing the systems in which human beings and ...

Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history. The current mass ...

The Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate ...

Due to their size and abundance, these creatures shaped the ecosystems in which they lived – but today all are nearly gone ...

A recent study has painted a concerning picture of Earth's distant future, suggesting that extreme heat could lead to a mass extinction event ... be suitable for human life if continental ...

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

Some researchers argue that it’s too early to officially declare a mass extinction. But that debate doesn’t change the reality: the current rate of biodiversity loss is unprecedented in human ...

Read: Earth is not in the midst of a sixth mass extinction This skepticism of human influence is also getting in the way of mitigating the problems we have caused, perhaps nowhere more clearly ...