But the Permian detectives are faced with a host of suspects and not enough evidence to convict any of them. To understand this extinction, I wanted first to get a sense of its scale.

Since the first sharks emerged in the world’s oceans nearly half a billion years ago, the world has gone through five major mass extinction events. Each one took a considerable fraction of all the ...

The Permian extinction saw the loss of 80 to 96 percent of all marine species. In the Cretaceous event, perhaps 60 to 75 percent of marine species disappeared. What caused these immense die-offs?

During its approximately 4.5 billion years of existence, the Earth has experienced five major mass extinction events that are responsible for reshaping the planet both physically and biologically. The ...

This was the Permian, an obscure era of geological history where the planet was ruled by giant, bone-chilling beasts that ran with a characteristic waddle and sometimes snacked on sharks.

During the end-Permian extinction 95 percent of all species on Earth became extinct, compared to only 75 percent during the K-T when a large asteroid apparently caused the dinosaurs to disappear.

The end-Permian extinction, tooking place about 250 million years ago, eliminated more than 90 percent of Earth's marine species and 75 percent of terrestrial species. Although scientists had ...

The marine version of the end-Permian extinction took up 100,000 years out of the entire 3,800,000,000 years that life has existed--the equivalent to 14 minutes out of a whole year.

The extinction “could have been a one-two punch,” said Bruce S. Lieberman, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas and a co-author of the theory.