Latest Extinction events Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Approximately 252 million years ago, during the world’s largest mass extinction event, nine out of ten species vanished from the planet. Based on fossil records from sites in South Africa and southwest Russia, many scientists have long thought the predecessors of dinosaurs largely missed the race to fill habitat niches that were emptied during this event. However, according to an international team of scientists, it turns out they...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Researchers from the University of Colorado claim to have uncovered new evidence supporting the notion that a Manhattan-sized asteroid collided with the Earth some 66 million years ago, triggering a global firestorm that would have led to the extinction of 80 percent of the planet’s species. According to Douglas Robertson of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and colleagues, the firestorm...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One of the most popular theories on the disappearance of the dinosaurs surrounds the 110 mile-wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico. Many scientists believe the extinction was caused by an asteroid that crashed into Earth, leaving only a massive crater behind. However, a group of American scientists is presenting a theory that the culprit was actually a speeding comet, not a relatively slow-moving asteroid as many theories assert....

WATCH VIDEO: [Drilling Into The Jurassic In New Jersey] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Popular theory suggests that a massive asteroid smashed into Earth around 65 million years ago wiping most life, including the dinosaurs, off the face of the earth. Now, scientists have found evidence of another planetary cataclysm that occurred some 135 million years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction (CPE) event. An examination of evidence across three continents...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online About 635 million years ago, our world was covered in ice during an event called "Snowball Earth," and new details written in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provide new insight on the duration of this event. According to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, an ice age brought on rapid changes in the atmospheric conditions on our planet, followed by a rapid greenhouse heat wave. This period may have given rise to...

Peter Suciu for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously said “that which does kill us makes us stronger,” but apparently he didn’t understand the complexities of biodiversity. If he had, he might have noted that extinction could influence biodiversity as much as evolution. This is what researchers at the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania have discovered while examining plant diversity in South East Australia. Their...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online We’ve had an increasing fascination with comets and asteroids over the past several years. We’ve fictionally sent a rogue group of astronauts to detonate one of these heavenly travelers. We’ve seen the disastrous effect of a potential impact in both movies and on television. We’ve elevated our global anxiety tracking the trajectory of these large, quickly moving celestial bodies. And it seems our vigilance on this matter,...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online While it has long been assumed plant and animal life took a long time to recover following the largest mass extinction to date, researchers from the University of Zurich have discovered new evidence to suggest they may have bounced back sooner than previously believed. The mass extinction in question took place at the end of the Permian geological period some 252 million years ago, and scientists had long believed it took roughly...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A mass extinction, wiping out numerous species including the dinosaurs, marked the end of the Cretaceous Period. A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been. Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is home to the now-buried Chicxulub impact crater, caused by a mountain-sized asteroid. This impact is...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Life about 250 million years ago was hard to come by. In fact, it was nearly non-existent. Scientists, studying why this period, known as the end-Permian event, lasted so long and have found a key ingredient: heat. Paul Wignall, a paleontologist at England’s Leeds University, and study coauthor, said during the 200,000-year-long Permian extinction the Earth began cooking, with life struggling to thrive, especially at the...