Over the course of Earth’s history, life has been decimated by cataclysmic events, each one leaving an indelible mark on the planet’s biodiversity. For millions of years, creatures that once thrived ...

One of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions wiped out most ocean life during a sudden global ice age. From the ruins, jawed vertebrates survived, diversified, and transformed the course of evolution.

About 445 million years ago, Earth’s oceans turned into a danger zone. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

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 never stood still. Over its 4.5 billion years of history, our planet has been reshaped by different cataclysms and climate shifts. The atmosphere went through several changes, oceans froze ...

A massive ice age wiped out ocean life 445 million years ago, reshaping ecosystems and setting the stage for jawed fish ...

Discover how the first mass extinction put jawed fishes on the map, species that would later come to dominate animal life on ...

A spectacular fossil trove on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen shows that marine life made a stunning comeback after Earth’s greatest extinction. Tens of thousands of fossils reveal fully aquatic ...