View Full Profile. Learn about our Editorial Policies. Most scientists agree that five events in Earth’s history qualify as “mass extinctions”—defined as events where more than three-quarters of ...

Image caption, There have been five major mass extinctions. The most famous is probably the one which wiped out the dinosaurs. When an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago, it triggered ...

There’s no single reason sharks survived all five major extinction events – all had different causes and different groups of sharks pulled through each one. One general theme, however, seems to be the ...

Violent supernovas may have caused two of Earth’s largest mass extinctions that have never been completely explained, ...

Our planet now faces a global extinction crisis never witnessed by humankind. Scientists predict that more than 1 million species are on track for extinction in the coming decades. But there’s still ...

This realization led Wright and his coauthors to connect the cosmic phenomenon with mass extinctions on Earth. Cataclysmic events have taken place five times in the past 500 million years ...