British paleontologist Thomas Halliday reveals how extinction is intimately linked to evolution in his book, Otherlands. He chronicles 16 extinct ecosystems over the past 520 million years to show ...

Graph from Biology: The Dynamics of Life by Alton Biggs, et al ... Many weedy species will probably survive, and even thrive, in the face of the current mass extinction. But thousands of ...

During long history of planet Earth, massive extinctions and violent climate changes are the norm. We’ve created this infographic to help you chart the rise and fall and rise of life on Earth ...

Extinction, which can have a variety of causes, results in the permanent elimination of one or more species. According to most scientists, 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived are now ...

At least five times, a biological catastrophe has engulfed Earth killing off the vast majority of species. As scientists say we’re in a sixth mass extinction, what can we learn from the past?

Extinction’s beneficent side puts us in an awkward, even discomforting position. The world, after all, is on the upslope of another significant extinction event.

But 31 times in the past 542 million years the carbon level has deviated either much more than normal or much faster than usual (dots in main graph). Each of the five great mass extinctions ...

A mass extinction, 66 million years ago, triggered by a giant impact in the Yucatan basin, wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal life on Earth, including, famously, the dinosaurs.

About 252 million years ago, extreme El Niño ocean warming events were a major driver of the largest mass extinction in our planet’s history.The Permian-Triassic warming events killed 80 to 90 ...

Mega El Niños could have intensified the world’s most devastating mass extinction, which ended the Permian Period 252 million years ago, a new study found.

Volcanoes spewing carbon dioxide 250 million years ago heated the climate so much that extreme El Niño events became the norm, pushing most life on Earth past its limits.

Life on land flourished only 75,000 years after the End-Permian Mass Extinction, so life really does find a way. Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads5614. Elizabeth Rayne ...