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 ...

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 ...

CREDIT: Nick Fitzhardinge via Getty Images. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service ...

It’s sad when living things go extinct. That means they’re gone forever. I think about extinct unicorns all. the. time. My friend Jodi Rosso told me that a mass extinction is when a huge number of ...

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 ...

We may not be living through Earth’s sixth mass extinction event ­­— at least not yet. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis of plant and animal extinctions published September 4 in PLOS Biology.

This lineage was widespread and abundant in the Late Cretaceous, but just a few species survive today off the coasts of Australia. If you’re an animal living through a mass extinction, it’s best to be ...

Asteroid impacts and volcanism have led to mass extinctions on our planet. Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz / NASA / Public Domain Life’s first major catastrophe crept across the planet with the ...

Study finds that the mass extinction caused by an asteroid about 66 million years ago led to critical changes in bird genomes that ultimately sparked the incredibly diversity living birds. Shortly ...

Dinosaurs only started to live large after a mass extinction altered the planet in their favor. Lucas Atwell CC BY-SA 3.0 Everyone knows about the mass extinction that ended the Age of Dinosaurs.