Earth news stories

A 6-mile-wide space rock and colossal eruptions racked Earth at the same fateful moment. Scientists have tried for decades to determine the primary suspect behind the Cretaceous Extinction.

The physicist on Newton finding inspiration amid the great plague, how the multiverse can unite religions, ‘reaching out to aliens is a terrible idea’ and why a ‘theory of everything’ is within our grasp.

Fossilized pollen and leaves reveal that the meteorite that caused the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs also reshaped South America’s plant communities to yield the planet’s largest rain forest

Space scientists have discovered extra-terrestrial particles which point to a medium-sized asteroid impact in Antarctica 430,000 years ago.

Earth has experienced five major mass extinction events over the past 500 million years. Massive volcanic eruptions have been identified as the major driver of the environmental changes that precipitated at least three of these extinction events.

A six-year-old boy has found a fossil dating back millions of years in his garden after receiving a fossil-hunting kit for Christmas

The oldest known primate fossils were dated to just after the extinction event 66 million years ago—suggesting some primate ancestors lived even longer ago.

The class of marine animals known as cephalopoda – which today includes squids, octopuses, and cuttlefishes – could have been around on Earth 30 million years earlier than previously thought, according to new research.

Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state.

As the Arctic warms much faster than everywhere else on the planet in response to climate change, the findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may not only be a glimpse of the past but a snapshot of our potential future.

If we want to predict our planet’s future under climate change, we must better understand what has happened on Earth before, even hundreds of thousands of years in the past.

About 70 million years ago, an ostrich-like dinosaur brooding atop a nest of blue-green eggs met its doom, perishing with its nearly-hatched babies in what is now southern China.

The Greenland ice sheet has been there for a long time. As near as we can tell, it could have been extensive as early as 45 million years ago.

Earth and giant meteorites go way back, but new research confirms that what had been proposed as the oldest impact crater on the planet – the 100-kilometer (62-mile) wide Maniitsoq structure – isn’t actually an impact crater at all.

The earliest multicellular organisms may have lacked heads, legs, or arms, but pieces of them remain inside of us today, new research shows.