Since the beginning of time, Earth has created life and then wiped out most of it in catastrophic, ultra-destructive moments.

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 ...

There have been five unquestionably great extinctions on earth: the end-Ordovician, the late-Devonian, the end-Permian, end-Triassic, and the end-Cretaceous extinctions. Some think we are now in a ...

Paleontologists recognize five big mass extinctions in the fossil record. At the end of the Ordovician period, about 443 million years ago, an estimated 86 percent of all marine species disappeared.

Introduction -- Beginnings -- The end-Ordovician mass extinction -- The late Devonian mass extinction -- The end-Permian mass extinction -- The end-Triassic mass extinction -- The end-Cretaceous mass ...

The End-Ordovician Extinction was the first of the so-called ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth - more than 80% of species in the oceans died out. But could you survive its ...

The "Big Five" mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic Eon have long attracted significant attention from the geoscience community and the public. Among them, the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME) is ...

The once very successful group of marine arthropods called trilobites were hit hard by the Ordovician mass extinction and never fully recovered until going extinct 200 million years later. At the end ...

The small size of Early Triassic marine organisms has important implications for the ecological and environmental pressures operating during and after the end-Permian mass extinction. However, this ...

The early Palaeozoic Era records the initial biodiversification of the Phanerozoic. The increase in biodiversity involved drastic changes in taxon longevity, and in rates of origination and extinction ...