About 19 million years ago, roughly 90% of the world’s open-ocean sharks died off, and scientists don’t know why.
Non-marine animals (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have apparently experienced at least 10 distinct episodes of intensified extinctions over the past 300 million years. Eight of these extinction events are concurrent with known marine mass extinctions, which previously yielded evidence for an underlying period of 26.4 to 27.3 million years ago. In new research, a team of scientists from New York University and Carnegie Institution for Science performed an analysis of the ten recognized non-marine mass extinctions and detected a statistically significant underlying periodicity of 27.5 million years; they also found that these mass extinctions align with major asteroid impacts and devastating volcanic outpourings of lava called flood-basalt eruptions.
According to a new study published this week by researchers at the University of Illinois, a nearby star’s supernova may’ve caused one of out planets mass extinctions millions of years ago.
Is it climate change, pollution, an unknown disease? A dedicated few are trying to crack the mystery.
Geologists from Tohoku University, Japan, Amherst College and Washington University in Saint Louis, the United States, say they may have found the cause of the end-Ordovician mass extinction, the first of the world’s five known mass extinctions.
New evidence involving the ancient poop of some of the huge and astonishing creatures that once roamed Australia indicates the primary cause of their extinction around 45,000 years ago was likely a result of humans, not climate change.
Is the loss of a unique life form on Earth big news? Not according to most media outlets. But how can the public care about global mass extinction if they aren’t even told about its victims?
Is it possible for a supernova explosion hundreds of light-years away to cause mass extinctions on our planet?
Was it an asteroid or something inside that wiped the dinosaur off the face of the earth?
