and then a mass extinction of all but the most hardy hangers-on. Lather, rinse, repeat. And it all started – at least, for complex life as we think of it today – with the Cambrian explosion. It was ...

The Cambrian explosion was an extraordinary phenomenon in the evolution of life on the planet that led to the emergence of ...

Some perspective: The Ediacaran Period spanned roughly 96 million years, bookended on either side by the end of Cryogenian Period -- 635 million years ago -- and the beginning of the Cambrian ...

Similar events are thought to have caused the massive Permian extinction 251 million years ago. There were several rapid extinction events in the second half of the Cambrian, Gill says.

The Ordovician event seems to have been the result of two climate phenomena. First, a planetary-scale period of glaciation (a global-scale “ice age”), then a rapid warming period. The second mass ...

But during that short span, the soft-bodied, stationary Ediacaran fauna suddenly disappeared, driven to extinction by predators, he suggests. This is the most significant event in Earth evolution.

The event is sometimes also known as the K-T extinction, and geologists call it the“K-Pg extinction because the letter "C" is shorthand for a previous geological period called the Cambrian.

Geobiologists shine new light on Earth’s first known mass extinction event 550 million years ago Work shows a major loss of diversity during the Ediacaran Period, which lasted from 635 million ...

Since at least the Cambrian period that began around 540 million years ago, when the diversity of life first exploded into a vast array of forms, only five extinction events have definitively met ...

In a first-of-its-kind study, Stanford researchers have measured how the abundance of ocean life has changed over the past ...

After the catastrophic mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, about 250 million years ago, the dinosaurs came to the fore in a reptilian world, and after their extinction 65 million ...