Around 540 million years ago, Earth's biosphere underwent a pivotal transformation, shifting from a microbe-dominated world ...

For decades, scientists treated the end of Earth’s habitability as a problem for the far future, measured in several billion ...

Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere faces a finite lifespan of about 1.08 billion years before a sharp decline, according to a ...

Learn how geological clues preserved in ancient oceans link repeated volcanic eruptions to Triassic marine extinctions.

Just over half a billion years ago, Earth was rocked by a global mass extinction event, a dramatic interruption of the ...

Mass extinction events throughout Earth’s history are characterized as significant disruptions to life on the planet. There ...

The fossils offer a rare glimpse into a cataclysmic event that brought a sudden end to the greatest explosion of life in our planet's history.

NANJING -- Scientists in China have unearthed a treasure trove of ancient fossils that is helping to rewrite the story of one ...

The collapse of tropical forests during Earth’s most catastrophic extinction event was the primary cause of the prolonged global warming which followed, according to new research. The Permian–Triassic ...

The West Texas desert has a surprising feature: a prehistoric ocean reef. There is a surprising natural wonder in the middle of the vast West Texas desert: a prehistoric ocean reef built from the ...

Almost all life on land and in the ocean was wiped out during "The Great Dying," a mass extinction event at the end of the Permian Era about 250 million years ago. New evidence suggests that the Great ...

Land snail extinctions are accelerating across islands, exposing a devastating collapse of some of the world’s most fragile ...