A quarter of a billion years ago, long before dinosaurs or mammals evolved, the predator Dinogorgon, whose skull is shown here, hunted floodplains in the heart of today's South Africa. In less than a ...

The West Texas desert has a surprising feature: a prehistoric ocean reef. There is a surprising natural wonder in the middle of the vast West Texas desert: a prehistoric ocean reef built from the ...

Therapsids, the ancient ancestors of mammals, were integral to Earth’s ecosystems during the middle to late Permian period. (CREDIT: Bruce Aleksander / Flickr) Therapsids, the ancient relatives of ...

The mass extinction that ended the Permian geological epoch, 252 million years ago, wiped out most animals living on Earth. Huge volcanoes erupted, releasing 100,000 billion metric tons of carbon ...

Approximately 250 million years ago, during the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which is also popularly known as the period of "The Great Dying", the Earth experienced its most catastrophic ...

Scientists don’t call it the “Great Dying” for nothing. About 252 million years ago, upward of 80% of all marine species vanished during the end-Permian mass extinction – the most extreme event of its ...

Though the End-Permian mass extinction event is predicted to have killed off 80% of all life on Earth, new research is revealing survivors. In what is now China, it seems that plants were able to ...

A new study reveals that Earth's biomes changed dramatically in the wake of mass volcanic eruptions 252 million years ago. Reading time 3 minutes 252 million years ago, volcanic eruptions in ...