Crocodylians are surviving members of a 230-million-year lineage called crocodylomorphs, a group that includes living crocodylians (i.e. crocodiles, alligators...
According to new research from Keele University and the Universidad de Alicante, near-Earth explosions of giant O- and B-type stars occur at a rate of...
Searching for land refugia becomes imperative for human survival during the hypothetical sixth mass extinction. Studying past comparable crises can offer...
Primitive amphibians called temnospondyls survived the aftermath of the end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred about 252 million years ago, by feeding...
The end-Triassic extinction along with the end-Permian and end-Cretaceous events are the most severe mass extinctions in the past 270 million years. The...
The end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred about 252 million years ago, was the most severe extinction event in the past 540 million years, eliminating...
In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists offer a new explanation for a string of severe environmental crises, called oceanic anoxic...
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...
Across the last 50,000 years land vertebrate faunas have experienced severe losses of large species (megafauna), with most extinctions occurring in the...
The end-Cretaceous mass extinction, which included the elimination of all non-avian dinosaurs, occurred after the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid and...
Paleontologists have uncovered the fossilized remains of a new species of the Pleistocene eagle genus Dynatoaetus in Victoria Fossil Cave at Naracoorte,...
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...
The aftermaths of supernovae always produce X-rays, but if the supernova’s blast wave strikes dense surrounding gas, it can produce a particularly large...
The recovery of life from the devastating end-Permian mass extinction, which peaked about 252.3 million years ago, was an important period of evolution....
In new research, paleontologists analyzed abundances of sunscreen-like chemicals in 800 fossil pollen grains from 250-million-year-old rocks in Tibet.
The...
Paleontologists have long debated why groups such as non-avian dinosaurs became extinct whereas mammals and other lineages survived the end-Cretaceous...
The Devonian period, which occurred 419 to 358 million years ago, prior to the evolution of life on land, is known for a series of catastrophic mass extinction...
Mass extinctions are well recognized as significant steps in the evolutionary trajectory of life on Earth. In new research, geobiologists from Virginia...
