Around 252 million years ago, the world suddenly heated up. Over a geologically brief period of tens of thousands of years, ...

Mega El Niños could have intensified the world’s most devastating mass extinction, which ended the Permian Period 252 million ...

Researchers uncovered footprints left by dinosaurs who could roam from Africa to South America when the continents were part ...

Lavas from hotspots—whether erupting in Hawaii, Samoa or Iceland—likely originate from a worldwide, uniform reservoir in ...

Volcanoes spewing carbon dioxide 250 million years ago heated the climate so much that extreme El Niño events became the norm ...

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, scientists have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet ...

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth's surface, we have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the ...

A new study from Monash University scientists suggests that Earth may have had a ring system that formed around 466 million ...

Antarctica is covered by a miles-thick ice sheet, but was that always the case? And when was the coldest continent ice-free?

High in the Canadian wilderness, Smithsonian scientists search for ancient minerals that could explain the origins of the ...

Coelacanth fossils like these are useful because two known coelacanth species are still alive today. They are likened to ...

Climate change and asteroids are linked with animal origin and extinction -- and plate tectonics also seems to play a key evolutionary role, 'groundbreaking' new fossil research reveals. The discovery ...