Nearly 445 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician period, Earth faced its first known mass extinction,an event so ...

The Earth has gone through many major events over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Some of the most significant ...

Sharks showed up just in time for the end of the world, appearing just 10 million years before the End-Ordovician extinction. Those earliest sharks were probably toothless and wouldn’t ...

The End-Ordovician Extinction was the first of the so-called ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth - more than 80% of species in the oceans died out. But could you ...

Traditionally, the duration of LOME was estimated at 1–2 million years. However, the use of advanced high-precision zircon U-Pb dating techniques shows that the extinction occurred on a much ...

Learn about how researchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past… ...

But the first major mass extinction was way before that – about 443 million years ago. It’s called the Late Ordovician mass extinction. Back then, most living things were in the ocean.

Researchers first identified the cause of the end-Cretaceous extinction by the discovery of the “iridium anomaly” — a 1-centimeter-thick (0.4-inch-thick) layer of sedimentary rock rich in ...

Violent supernovas may have caused two of Earth’s largest mass extinctions that have never been completely explained, according to a theory put forward in new research.During the final stages of ...