At some point in the deep past, humans may have come frighteningly close to disappearing altogether. Here’s what we know, ...

Millions of years of isolation have shaped Australia's extraordinary mammal fauna into species unlike anywhere else in the ...

For decades, the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs has stood as a symbol of total planetary devastation. But ...

Tens of thousands of years ago, the first wave of a worldwide tsunami now known as the “Sixth Extinction” swept across the ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

Ancient sloths ranged in size from tiny climbers to ground-dwelling giants. Now, researchers report this body size diversity was largely shaped by sloths’ habitats, and that these animals’ precipitous ...

One of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions wiped out most ocean life during a sudden global ice age. From the ruins, jawed vertebrates survived, diversified, and transformed the course of evolution.

The extinction of the largest dinosaurs to walk the Earth may have played a critical role in creating an environment that helped fruits evolve, thereby indirectly shaping the evolution of our own ...

Sixty-six million years ago, the dinosaurs had a really bad day when a colossal asteroid impact spurred their extinction. But ...

Speciation and extinction are the twin engines that have sculpted the diversity of life on Earth. Speciation, the process by which new species arise from ancestral populations, is driven by a mixture ...