Unlike the Earth’s “Big Five” great mass extinctions, scientists now think the first mass extinction, during the Ediacaran Period, may be like the “Sixth Extinction” happening today. Evolution was the ...

The Nature Index 2025 Research Leaders — previously known as Annual Tables — reveal the leading institutions and countries/territories in the natural and health sciences, according to their output in ...

The Ordovician Period followed the Cambrian and it is recognized as a separate time interval because of differences in the kinds of animals found in each. As we saw in Chapter 3, the Cambrian came to ...

The Cambrian explosion was an extraordinary phenomenon in the evolution of life on the planet that led to the emergence of many animal phyla and the diversification of species. During this period, ...

A new study by Virginia Tech geobiologists traces the cause of the first known mass extinction of animals to decreased global oxygen availability, leading to the loss of a majority of animals present ...

For more than a century, the Cambrian explosion has served as biology’s big bang: the moment, roughly 538.8 million years ago, when complex animal body plans seemingly burst into the fossil record ...

Mass extinction is, as it were, a way of life. Earth’s history has seen several. The most famous, 66m years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, did for most of the dinosaurs (only a few of the ...

A global drop in oxygen levels about 550 million years ago led to Earth's first known mass extinction, new evidence suggests. The height of the Ediacaran period, about 550 million years ago, was a ...

A new study by Virginia Tech geobiologists traces the cause of the first known mass extinction of animals to decreased global oxygen availability, leading to the loss of a majority of animals present ...