About 12,000 years ago, large mammals rapidly died out in North America. Mastodons, giant sloths and saber tooth cats were a few of the megafauna that disappeared. And it seemed to happen quite close ...

The term “mass extinction” conjures up apocalyptic images of the world coming to an end, but a massive event like this can be a much slower process than many people realize. By definition, a mass ...

The Jurassic Period is one of the three prehistoric geological periods of the Mesozoic Era. It spans from 145 million to 201 million years ago. This period was preceded by the Triassic Period and ...

Everyone knows that dinosaurs are extinct, and most people have some idea about how it might have occurred. But the exact periods in history when it happened are less well known. Was it a single ...

Last year, hiking in Morocco’s eastern Atlas Mountains, I found an ammonite, a fossil of those spiral-shape cephalopods that to many symbolize paleontology itself. The fossilization process had turned ...

It is estimated that throughout the Earth's 4.5 billion-year existence, over 99% of the species inhabiting it have gone extinct. Many of these species died due to mass extinction events. Life on Earth ...