How It Works

2 min read

A global extinction event that occurred around 359 million years ago may have been triggered by the death blast of a distant star. Towards the end of the Devonian Period, 416 million to 358 million years ago, there was a mass extinction known as the

Creative Nonfiction

14 min read

March in the Pioneer Valley is mud season. On the precipice of spring, the ground thaws into a gooey, soupy mess that engulfs truck tires, commandeers hiking trails, and swallows rubber boots with all the hunger of an enduring winter. Into this fifth

NPR

5 min read

In his book "The Ends of the World," Peter Brannen looks at what happened to cause past crises and extinctions, and tries to determine what our future might bring.

All About Space

2 min read

One of the worst extinction events in Earth’s history may have been triggered by a supernova, the violent death of a distant star. About 75 per cent of all species on Earth died out at the end of the Devonian Period, nearly 360 million years ago. Roc

TIME

2 min read

WHEN PEOPLE HEAR THE WORD extinction, they invariably think of dinosaurs. But we are now on the verge of soil extinction—the greatest crisis of our times. Can soil ever turn extinct? Yes, it can. If you remove organic content (in the form of plant li

Weekend Argus Saturday

2 min read

ZAITUNA Skosan has the eye. Where others see rock, her eye spots bone, where some notice a pebble, Skosan recognises the remains of an animal that died a quarter of a billion years ago. On most fossil hunting expeditions Skosan can be seen walking th

Time Magazine International Edition

2 min read

WHEN PEOPLE HEAR THE WORD extinction, they invariably think of dinosaurs. But we are now on the verge of soil extinction—the greatest crisis of our times. Can soil ever turn extinct? Yes, it can. If you remove organic content (in the form of plant li

NPR

1 min read

Earth has experienced cataclysmic life-destroying events before. NPR's Scott Simon reflects on what this means for humans in the midst of climate change.

Popular Mechanics South Africa

2 min read

FIVE MASS EXTINCTION EVENTS ARE generally credited with the state of life on Earth today, but new scientific evidence suggests Earth’s history may be marked by additional extinction events, as well as seemingly incidental population explosions. Jenni

Futurity

2 min read

Sixty-five million years ago, clouds of ash choked the skies over Earth. Dinosaurs, along with about half of all the species on Earth, staggered and died. But in the seas, a colorful population of marine bivalves—the group including oysters, clams, a

Futurity

2 min read

New research links the long lag time in recovery after a mass extinction to evolution. It takes at least 10 million years for life to fully recover after a mass extinction, a speed limit for the recovery of species diversity that is well known among

The Oldie

3 min read

Jonathan Cape £20 One evening in 1899, Thomas Hardy was working by the light of his desk lamp. A longlegs, a moth, a bumblebee and a fly were drawn to his desk by the bright beams. My guests besmear my new-penned line, Or bang at the lamp and fall su

New Philosopher

5 min read

When I visit my family home in London, where I partly grew up, I make sure I run around Regent’s Park. There, I have a little ritual: to see how many animals I can spot through the fence of London Zoo, which sits inside the park’s parameters. As a ch

BBC Wildlife Magazine

1 min read

Thank you, Mark Carwardine, for your recent article regarding our terrifying situation and the sixth mass extinction of life that we are observing (My way of thinking, December 2020). It is so good to see that the truth is, at last, starting to be se

The Atlantic

5 min read

Imagine if every animal and plant on the planet collapsed into a single population each, says ecologist Gerardo Ceballos. If lions disappeared except from one small corner of Kenya, the prey they keep in check would run amok everywhere else. If sparr

Futurity

2 min read

Activity from volcanoes did not play a direct role in the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, researchers say. It was all about the asteroid. In a break from a number of other recent studies, researchers argue that environmental impacts

BBC Countryfile Magazine

4 min read

Extinction is in the air. Climate rebels have blocked roads and bridges, and glued themselves to the tarmac in extinction’s name. But whose extinction exactly? The natural world’s or our own? Extinction is, of course, a natural process. Without it, l

Futurity

2 min read

A new study suggests the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago could have increased the pace of evolution in birds, their only remaining descendants. The meteor-induced mass extinction (a.k.a. the K-Pg event) led to an accel

Futurity

1 min read

More than half of mammal species went extinct after human colonization in the Caribbean alone. Can nature restore the numbers of species on islands to levels that existed before human arrival—and, if so—how long would it take for nature to regain thi

Re:Think

3 min read

Most of those who are involved in research and management of threatened species take it as self-evident that we should seek to conserve those species, to prevent their extinction. That’s not surprising. We are intrigued by them and we have devoted mu

Audubon Magazine

1 min read

LAST OCTOBER TWO MEN IN Indonesian Borneo noticed an unidentifiable red-eyed bird while on a forest foraging trip. They sent images to a local birding group, setting off a game of telephone as incredulous ornithologists circulated the photos around t

ELLE Australia

3 min read

an outdoorsy childhood spent camping and four-wheel-driving with her family, plus some solo hiking (“When I was about 14, my mum used to drop me off at one end of the Grampians, drive to the other end and hike to meet me”) meant Kate Grarock has alwa

The Atlantic

4 min read

According to a new study, the infamous asteroid had only a 13 percent chance of exterminating the giant reptiles.

TechLife

2 min read

This epic rainy spell, known now as the Carnian Pluvial Episode (CPE), occurred roughly 233 million years ago and was a stark shift from the typically arid conditions of the late Triassic Period. But storms weren’t the only change Earth was facing. R

India Today

1 min read

Arodent made global headlines last week: the disappear-ance of the Bramble Cay melomys' was recorded as the first mammalian extinction credited to global warming. The critters, whose only habitat was a low-lying Australian islet, were wiped out by ri

Futurity

2 min read

One in three species of all plants and animals may face extinction by 2070, according to a new study based on data from hundreds of species around the globe. Accurately predicting biodiversity loss from climate change requires a detailed understandin

Futurity

2 min read

Mass extinctions of animals that live on land happen on a 27-million-year cycle, according to new research. The cycle of mass extinctions of land-dwellers—including amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds—coincide with previously reported mass extin

Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

6 min read

Spin a globe slowly to find New Zealand. It’s one of the world’s most isolated island countries. Australia, the nearest significant land mass, is over a thousand miles away. Composed of two big islands stretching almost 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from no

The Big Issue

1 min read

Williamson’s still-unsurpassed classic combines poetic imagination with close observation of a wild animal in its natural environment. To survive, the young otter must cope with threats from other creatures of the wild as well as persecution by human

Los Angeles Times

2 min read

Scientists studying plant life around the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs have made a surprising discovery: Out of all the birds living at the time, only the ground-dwelling species survived. The finding, described in the journal Current B