The curious minds at What If explore what it would be like if you lived during the Permian Period.

What was the Permian Period like? What creatures thrived there before the period came to an abrupt end? Thanks to efforts by an international research team, 17 years of fossils collected in Africa may ...

(CNN) — A cataclysm engulfed the planet some 252 million years ago, wiping out more than 90% of all life. Known as the Great Dying, the mass extinction that ended the Permian geological period was the ...

Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, Earth experienced a mass extinction so devastating that it's become known as "the Great Dying." Massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate ...

Imagine a world on the brink of collapse: volcanic eruptions spewing toxic gases, oceans turning acidic, and up to 90% of Earth's species vanishing in the blink of an eye. This was the reality at the ...

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...

Christian Sidor is a professor in the UW Department of Biology and curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Burke. And for the last 18 years, he’s been traveling back and forth to Zambia and Tanzania ...

There’s nothing like a big mass extinction to open up ecological niches and clear out the competition, accelerating evolution for some lucky survivors. Or is there? A new study suggests that the rate ...