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 ...

Earth has a long and dramatic history, and one recurring theme is extinction. Did you know that over the last 500 million years, our planet experienced five major mass extinction events? These events ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Sharks might be the all time bullet-dodging champions. They’ve been around for about 450 million years, longer than trees, longer ...

The Earth has lived through 5 mass extinctions of animals and plants. The last one - 66 million years ago - took out the dinosaurs. That extinction is believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid ...

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

Violent supernovas may have caused two of Earth’s largest mass extinctions that have never been completely explained, according to a theory put forward in new research.During the final stages of a ...

Humans have wiped out hundreds of species — with many more on the brink or experiencing large declines in population. Some scientists have argued that we have entered a “sixth mass extinction” event ...

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.