The Paleozoic era culminated 251.9 million years ago in the most severe mass extinction recorded in the geologic record. Known as the "great dying," this event saw the loss of up to 96% of all marine species and around 70% ...
Earth Sciences
May 19, 2021
0
12
Mass extinctions are known as times of global upheaval, causing rapid losses in biodiversity that wipe out entire animal groups. Some of the doomed groups linger on before going extinct, and a team of scientists found these ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Apr 20, 2021
0
115
Earth has experienced five major mass extinction events over the past 500 million years. Massive volcanic eruptions have been identified as the major driver of the environmental changes that precipitated at least three of ...
Earth Sciences
Mar 29, 2021
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2285
Over the course of Earth's history, several mass extinction events have destroyed ecosystems, including one that famously wiped out the dinosaurs. But none were as devastating as "The Great Dying," which took place 252 million ...
Ecology
Mar 17, 2021
1
880
The asteroid impact 66 million years ago that ushered in a mass extinction and ended the dinosaurs also killed off many of the plants that they relied on for food. Fossil leaf assemblages from Patagonia, Argentina, suggest ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jan 5, 2021
0
328
Charles Darwin's landmark opus "On the Origin of the Species" ends with a beautiful summary of his theory of evolution: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into ...
Evolution
Dec 10, 2020
14
14342
Chemical clues left behind by humble microbes have rewritten the timeline of one of the biggest mass extinction events in Earth's history.
Earth Sciences
Nov 18, 2020
0
4
It's not often a new mass extinction is identified; after all, such events were so devastating they really stand out in the fossil record. In a new paper, published today in Science Advances, an international team has identified ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 16, 2020
1
2450
What if impact craters, long seen as harbingers of death, turned out to be the cradle of life?
Astrobiology
Sep 2, 2020
1
134
Imagine reading by the light of an exploded star, brighter than a full moon—it might be fun to think about, but this scene is the prelude to a disaster when the radiation devastates life as we know it. Killer cosmic rays ...
Astronomy
Aug 18, 2020
7
6859
