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 ...

Over hundreds of millions of years, the planet has had five mass extinctions, and in time life has recovered. The process of recovery has been studied far less than the extinction events ...

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 ...

It occurs when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation. The number of major mass extinctions in the last 440 million years are estimated from as few as five to more ...

Is the biosphere today on the verge of anything like the mass ... extinction rate is landscape modification, an impact greatly increased by the burgeoning human population. Now standing at 5.7 ...

which is considered to be the last major mass extinction event before today. This comparison can offer an inkling of what might await us in the future. Global warming is producing a rapid loss of ...

Throughout its 4.5 billion-year history, Earth has endured numerous mass extinctions ... collapse of the dinosaurs to see what effect major perturbations in Earth's environment can have on ...

This story appears in the October 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine. Some scientists contend that we’re heading toward what would be the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on ...

Armed with a new approach for statistical analysis, they examined all previous mass extinctions of land animals, including amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds and discovered a similar cycle ...

Less than 5 percent of the animal species in the seas ... to identify the killer responsible for the largest of the many mass extinctions that have struck the planet. The most famous die-off ...