About 445 million years ago, Earth nearly wiped out life in the oceans. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots ...

Discover how the first mass extinction put jawed fishes on the map, species that would later come to dominate animal life on ...

The extinction of dinosaurs had a significant impact on the development of plants, a new study has shown. Experts at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in the cities of ...

Robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. At the start of the simulation, a biped ...

Warnings that humanity is heading toward its own disappearance have shifted from the fringes of science fiction into mainstream research and public debate. Instead of vague prophecies, scientists now ...

With the extinction of large, non-flying dinosaurs 66 million years ago, large herbivores were missing on Earth for the subsequent 25 million years. Since plants and herbivorous animals influence each ...

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 rate ...

A study has found evidence that the evolution of tree roots over 300 million years ago triggered mass extinction events through the same chemical processes created by pollution in modern oceans and ...

Did a collision with a giant asteroid or comet change the shape of life on Earth forever? It is widely agreed that such an object -- 10 kilometers across -- struck just off the coast of the Yucatan ...

When the Kinks' Ray Davies penned the tune 'Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,' the vanishing locomotives stood as nostalgic symbols of a simpler English life. But for a paleontologist, the replacement ...