The dodo is often viewed as the classic example of extinction and obsolescence. However, the truth is that countless species have met similar fates. Here’s one bird whose epoch ended much in the same ...

The diversification of a lineage is the net output of speciation minus extinction. A theme that runs through much research into human evolution is whether the determinants of hominin diversification ...

The remarkably diverse plant communities of the Neotropics are the result of diversification driven by multiple biotic (for example, speciation, extinction and dispersal) and abiotic (for example, ...

Last year, hiking in Morocco’s eastern Atlas Mountains, I found an ammonite, a fossil of those spiral-shape cephalopods that to many symbolize paleontology itself. The fossilization process had turned ...

How did the woolly mammoth, an ambassador of the Ice Age, end up confined to modern-day Wrangel Island? And what ultimately caused their extinction? New evidence suggests it wasn’t poor genetics as ...

The sad history of the Pyrenean Ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) is a powerful example of species loss due to causes related to human activity. DNA analyses of Pyrenean Ibex found evidence that, after ...

Great auks (Pinguinus impennis) were large flightless birds that thrived on rocky islands in the North Atlantic for thousands of years. However, humans hunted them to extinction within just a few ...

Humans have long tinkered with the evolutionary trajectories of other species. Thousands of years ago we tamed wolves into dogs and transformed a wild grass into the agricultural wonder wheat. Within ...

The history of life on Earth has been marked five times by events of mass biodiversity extinction caused by extreme natural phenomena. Today, many experts warn that a Sixth Mass Extinction crisis is ...

In 2020, Oxford-based philosopher Toby Ord published a book called The Precipice about the risk of human extinction. He put the chances of "existential catastrophe" for our species during the next ...

Last week, researchers at the University of Melbourne announced that thylacines or Tasmanian tigers, the Australian marsupial predators extinct since the 1930s, could one day be ushered back to life.