For millions of years, Earth’s shifting plates have shaped continents, formed oceans, and built towering mountain ranges. But ...

Earth’s surface is constantly shifting, shaped by the slow but powerful movement of tectonic plates. While some plates have persisted for hundreds of millions of years, others have vanished, sinking ...

New research suggests the violent explosions of dying stars may have caused two of Earth’s biggest mass extinctions millions ...

Dinosaurs are the extinct relatives of birds that roamed the lands and seas of ancient Earth. They first appeared around 240 million to 230 million years ago in the Triassic Period, and went ...

Scientists discovered humans descended from two ancient populations, not one. These groups split 1.5 million years ago.

Cambridge University researchers have uncovered evidence that two distinct populations of ancient hominins, separated for ...

Scientists propose Earth ... a million-year stay near dense star nurseries, possibly cooling the planet as Antarctica’s ice grew. Gaia data shows our solar system swung within 65 light-years ...

It may have penetrated the Earth's atmosphere ... the Orion region occurred between approximately 18.2 and 11.5 million years ago, with the most likely time between 14.8 and 12.4 million years ...

A distant star’s explosion 2.5 million years ago may have blasted Earth with cosmic rays, mutating DNA and triggering a virus explosion in Lake Tanganyika. Scientists traced radioactive iron-60 ...

Between 36 and 20 million years ago the earth experienced the first of three major cooling steps. At this time a continental-scale temperate ice sheet emerged in East Antarctica. Meanwhile ...

About 800 million years ago, oxygen levels reached about 21 percent and began to breathe life into more complex organisms. The oxygen-rich ozone layer was also established, shielding the Earth's ...

One fateful day 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs — which had inhabited Earth for about 165 million years — got a nasty surprise: A roughly 9-mile-wide (15 kilometers) asteroid crashed into ...