Our planet’s first known mass extinction happened about 440 million years ago. Species diversity on Earth had been increasing over a period of roughly 30 million years, but that would come to a halt ...

Sharks might be the all time bullet-dodging champions. They’ve been around for about 450 million years, longer than trees, longer than the rings of Saturn, and longer than most of the other life on ...

Crocodiles are persistent - not just in their deadly pursuit of prey, but in terms of their existence. The contemporary species hails from a 230-million-year lineage that has survived two mass ...

A mass extinction event is a term used to describe a large-scale event that wipes out species. It is usually not a short, one-time incident but rather something that occurs over thousands or millions ...

Violent supernovas may have caused two of Earth’s largest mass extinctions that have never been completely explained, according to a theory put forward in new research.During the final stages of a ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Stewart Edie, Smithsonian Institution (THE CONVERSATION) About 66 million years ago – ...