While many creatures face the final curtain call of ... one animal seemingly ceased to exist before the mass extinction of ...

Learn about the climate changes that followed the end-Permian extinction, allowing select species to take over the planet's oceans.

After Earth's worst mass extinction, surviving ocean animals spread worldwide. Stanford's model shows why this happened.

These toughened-up creatures represented a crucial innovation ... the world's oceans until they were wiped out in the Permian extinctions about 250 million years ago. Photograph by James L.

proposed multiple mechanisms for why different locations had remarkably similar inhabitants following the end-Permian extinction. One hypothesis is "ecological release," where the die-offs of certain ...

About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, something killed some 90 percent of the planet's species. Less than 5 percent of the animal species in the seas survived. On land ...