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.

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

During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots separated by large areas of deep ocean. In these zones, surviving jawed ...

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

In a new study in Geology, researchers calculated how long it took for novel single-celled marine species to appear after the asteroid impact, and it’s surprisingly fast.

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

Speciation and extinction are the twin engines that have sculpted the diversity of life on Earth. Speciation, the process by which new species arise from ancestral populations, is driven by a mixture ...

A rapid climate collapse during the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction devastated ocean life and reshuffled Earth’s ecosystems.

For decades, the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs has stood as a symbol of total planetary devastation. But ...