Most megafaunal herbivores in the Americas went extinct around 10,000 years ago, presumably disrupting the long-distance seed dispersal of large, fleshy-fruited...
Today, there are only two sloth species, but historically, there were dozens of them, including one with a bottle-nosed snout that ate ants and another...
Large-bodied extinct kangaroos of the genus Protemnodon were not intrepid travelers who bounded across the plains, but rather homebodies, who did not journey...
Around 3,000-7,000 hunter-gatherers on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus hunted endemic dwarf hippopotamus (Phanourios minor) and dwarf elephants (Palaeoloxodon...
About 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, a 10-km-wide asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the town of Chicxulub in what...
Human settlement of islands across the Pacific Ocean was followed by waves of faunal extinctions that occurred so rapidly that their dynamics are difficult...
Across the last 50,000 years land vertebrate faunas have experienced severe losses of large species (megafauna), with most extinctions occurring in the...
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) became isolated on Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia around 10,000 years ago and persisted for over 200 generations...
A team of paleontologists from the United Kingdom and the United States has analyzed the fossil record of ammonites — marine mollusks often distinguished...
The extinction of the woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) at the onset of the Holocene remains an enigma, with conflicting evidence regarding its...
Gigantopithecus blacki, the largest ever primate and one of the largest species of the southeast Asian megafauna, persisted in China from about 2 million...
Birds are among the best-studied animal groups, but their prehistoric diversity is poorly known due to low fossilization potential. Hence, while many human-driven...
Mass extinctions during the past 500 million years rapidly removed branches from the tree of life and required millions of years for evolution to generate...
Islands often contain distinctive ecological conditions that can lead to unusual evolutionary trajectories such as dwarf mammoths and giant rats. In new...
A new study published in the journal Oryx shows that collaborative approaches to conservation can give hope to endangered species such as the South Andean...
A new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that more than 1,000 bird species became extinct on Pacific islands...
A team of researchers led by Dr. Susan Rule of the Australian National University has found that human arrival rather than climate change caused the extinction...
