In school, we learned about the asteroid that wiped out an estimated 76% of all creatures. Scientists now call this the fifth ...

How did the woolly mammoth, an ambassador of the Ice Age, end up confined to modern-day Wrangel Island? And what ultimately caused their extinction? New evidence suggests it wasn’t poor genetics as ...

By Rhett Ayers Butler [( In 1991, botanists Calaway Dodson and Alwyn Gentry advanced a striking proposition. Surveying a ...

The Xerces Blue butterfly (Glaucopsyche xerces) was native to the coastal dunes of San Francisco, in the United States. As the city grew, much of the butterfly’s habitat was destroyed and its ...

Researchers predict that 12.7% of marine teleost fish species are at risk of extinction, up fivefold from the International Union for Conservation of Nature's prior estimate of 2.5%. Their report ...

The dodo is often viewed as the classic example of extinction and obsolescence. However, the truth is that countless species have met similar fates. Here’s one bird whose epoch ended much in the same ...

Great auks (Pinguinus impennis) were large flightless birds that thrived on rocky islands in the North Atlantic for thousands of years. However, humans hunted them to extinction within just a few ...