The start of the Phanerozoic Eon 540 million years ago is marked by the Cambrian Explosion, a point in time when complex, hard-shelled organisms first appeared in the fossil record. Although ...

The geographic distribution of brachiopod genus occurrences over the Phanerozoic shows that secular declines in origination and extinction rates were paralleled by increases in invasion and ...

Hydrosphere interactions and alteration of the terrestrial crust likely played a critical role in shaping Earth’s surface, and in promoting prebiotic reactions leading to life, before 4.03 Ga (the ...

The "Big Five" mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic Eon have long attracted significant attention from the geoscience community and the public. Among them, the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME) is ...

For the first time since 1891, the geologic timescale is getting a new period. In March the International Union of Geological Scientists added the Ediacaran Period to the Precambrian Eon, an enormous ...

Advanced tools and expanded fossil datasets have painted a clearer picture of the eukaryotic diversity of the Proterozoic eon, which has been hard to quantify. The findings show that Earth's severe ...

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A new study co-led by the University of Arizona and the Smithsonian offers the most detailed glimpse yet into how Earth's surface temperature has changed over the past 485 million years. Published in ...

A view of one part of the Paleontology collection in the Museum of Natural History, arranged by the addition of representative specimens from other parts of the three floors of fossils in the East ...