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 ...

Last year, hiking in Morocco’s eastern Atlas Mountains, I found an ammonite, a fossil of those spiral-shape cephalopods that to many symbolize paleontology itself. The fossilization process had turned ...

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 ...

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 ...

Humans have wiped out hundreds of species — with many more on the brink or experiencing large declines in population. Some scientists have argued that we have entered a “sixth mass extinction” event ...

Our planet now faces a global extinction crisis never witnessed by humankind. Scientists predict that more than 1 million species are on track for extinction in the coming decades. But there’s still ...

Last week, researchers at the University of Melbourne announced that thylacines or Tasmanian tigers, the Australian marsupial predators extinct since the 1930s, could one day be ushered back to life.

The first global analysis of its kind found that logging and farming are taking away reptile habitat at an unsustainable pace, exacerbating a worldwide decline in biodiversity. By Catrin Einhorn About ...