But occasionally, extinction rates have surged far beyond usual levels, driving mass extinction events that have reshaped the trajectory of life. After a year teaching an algorithm to differentiate ...

Two nearby explosive massive star deaths, or supernovas, may have triggered mass extinction events in Earth's distant past, ...

New research suggests the violent explosions of dying stars may have caused two of Earth’s biggest mass extinctions millions ...

Whether extraterrestrial impacts or drastic climate changes are to blame, mass extinctions are evolutionary events that alter the history of life. Which species or groups survive a mass extinction ...

However, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event was not the worst loss of life ... of body sizes and functional variety expanded about 5 million years after the crisis and then dropped ...

The research emphasized that this change is part of the planet's ever-evolving nature and history of extinction events, and that Earth will continue to live on even if it does so without humans.

And right now, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event in the planet's 4.5 billion-year history. But surprisingly few Americans have ever heard of the extinction crisis, and even fewer ...

The four previous mass extinctions were also thought to have involved climatic changes—due to large-scale volcanic eruptions, for example—and in one case obliterated all but 5 percent of species. (See ...

Past extinction events offer clues about how the Earth has previously responded to being placed under such severe pressure. But how can we better understand this extinction? How does this ...

(Image Credit: Yang Dinghua) Artistic reconstruction of the terrestrial ecological landscape before the end Permian mass extinction based on fossil palynomorphs, plants , and tetrapods recovered, as ...