Today, many scientists believe we are on the cusp of a sixth mass extinction which could wipe out most life on Earth as we know it. Here are seven signs that they could be right.

Today from 12-1 PM PST, Annalee Newitz will be here talking about her new book, Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. She'll be in conversation with MIT science journalism professor Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus. And with you! Join us in a conversation about mass extinction,…

We may be in the early stages of a disaster so profound that it could kick off a mass extinction. Does that mean humanity is doomed? No. Scientific evidence suggests that humans will survive. Find out why, in this excerpt from Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction.

There's growing evidence that Earth may be headed for a mass extinction, where over 75 percent of all species die out and the world is changed forever. There's also evidence that humans would survive such an event — for better or for worse. Here's why.

A mass extinction that occurred over 200 million years ago killed off a slew of huge predators, including hefty beasts that looked like crocodiles and enormous armadillos, according to new research.

If you think asteroid strikes are scary, I've got some bad news for you. The most deadly events on Earth are caused by . . . Earth. New evidence suggests that underwater volcanoes may have wrecked our planet for thousands of years, and ultimately allowed dinosaurs to rule the world.

Scientists using a new and highly precise dating technique have concluded that the late Cretaceous asteroid strike in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula coincided almost exactly with the extinction of the dinosaurs — give-or-take a few tens of thousands of years. While it's clear that other factors were contributing to the…

That's the intriguing new hypothesis put forward to explain the Permian mass extinction, which wiped out more than 90% of all Earth's species 251 million years ago. And we even know which microbe is responsible for this omnicidal annihilation.

About 11,000 years ago, the final Ice Age end and humans began to spread out to all corners of the globe. Shortly thereafter, the world's megafauna went extinct. So was it climate or humanity that killed the last megafauna?

About 13,000 years ago, the megafauna of North America began to die out, and the world entered a brief cold period known as the Younger Dryas.