About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, a large proportion of species on Earth rapidly became extinct.

Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began. The fossil record tells us ...

Robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. At the start of the simulation, a biped ...

For decades, the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs has stood as a symbol of total planetary devastation. But hidden within the chaos it unleashed was the seed of a biological rebirth. In ...

The questions Prof. David Jablonski asks aren’t the little ones. “How do you go from a monkey hanging out in a tree, to an organism who can build electric guitars, and air conditioners, and trains, ...

A new study examined how bivalves -- the group that includes clams, mussels, scallops, and oysters -- evolved among many others in the period of rapid evolution known as the Cambrian Explosion. The ...

Beyond its implications for artificial intelligence, the research supports the idea that mass extinctions actually speed up evolution by unleashing new creativity in adaptations. Computer scientists ...

ANN ARBOR—Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began. The fossil record ...