Delving into the fascinating world of paleontology, we uncover the stories of species that lived through Earth’s mass extinctions. These hardy survivors reveal much about the nature of life on Earth ...

Lost fossils reveal that some of the first ocean predators went global astonishingly fast after Earth’s worst extinction.

About 66 million years ago – perhaps on a downright unlucky day in May – an asteroid smashed into our planet. Even groups that weathered the catastrophe, such as mammals, fishes and flowering plants, ...

Could we be on the verge of the sixth mass extinction? To better understand what’s to come for life on Earth–and the current harm we’re doing to our own environment–we have to look into the past.

Ancient sea organisms survived until a sudden extinction 550 million years ago, revealing what may be the first major mass ...

The model focused on “palaeogeographic context,” meaning the ancient layout of coasts, islands, and seaways. It tested whether coastline orientation and coastline shape predicted extinctions over deep ...

Just over half a billion years ago, Earth was rocked by a global mass extinction event, a dramatic interruption of the Cambrian explosion of life on Earth. What happened next, in the direct aftermath ...

Three tiny Purgatorius teeth found in Colorado are helping scientists trace how early primates evolved and spread across North America.

In paleontology, lineages that drop out of the fossil record and then re-emerge after long periods are termed ‘Lazarus taxa.’ ...

The fossils were found in flooded caves in the Dominican Republic. The cache, including seven skulls, five mandibles (jawbones) and dozens of other skeleton parts, makes the fossil site, Cueva Macho, ...

A lost cache of 250-million-year-old fossils from Australia has rewritten part of the story of life after Earth’s worst mass extinction. Instead of a single marine amphibian species, researchers ...

A team of researchers working in China’s Hunan province has unearthed more than 50,000 fossil specimens from one small quarry, identifying 91 previously unknown species that lived approximately 512 ...