Over the roughly 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence, there have been several periods were biodiversity has been nearly wiped out - extinction events. There have been several proposals to explain ...

The late Devonian extinction is one of the five major extinction events to have occurred on Earth. It's not unusual for scientists to argue over what causes a mass extinction event -- of the five, the ...

Safe distance: supernova SN 1987A as seen by the ESO Schmidt Telescope. Located 168,000 light-years away, this object posed no danger to Earth. (Courtesy: ESO) The explosion of a nearby star could ...

A distant star explosion could have been responsible for a massive extinction event on Earth. A new paper suggests that a star some 65 light-years from Earth may have exploded into a supernova, and ...

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 ...

A paper released this week by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign astronomy and physics professor Brian Fields makes a case for distant supernovae as a cause of a past mass extinction ...

The Late Devonian mass extinction (roughly 372 million years ago) was one of five mass extinctions in Earth's history, with roughly 75% of all species disappearing over its course. It happened in two ...

A team of researchers led by professor Brian Fields hypothesizes that a supernova about 65 light-years away may have contributed to the ozone depletion and subsequent mass extinction of the late ...

Mass extinctions are very important to how life evolved on Earth. For example, when an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago, the resulting dinosaur extinction led mammals to take their place.