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

In 2020, Oxford-based philosopher Toby Ord published a book called The Precipice about the risk of human extinction. He put the chances of “existential catastrophe” for our species during the next ...

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

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 ...

The term “de-extinction” often conjures images of Jurassic Park-style genetic manipulation, complete with ethical dilemmas and ecological chaos. But the reality of functional de-extinction—the ...

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 ...

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 ...

New research finds that the fertility rate needed to sustain a population is much higher than once thought, especially when sex ratios or mortality rates shift. This raises important questions for ...