Last year, hiking in Morocco’s eastern Atlas Mountains, I found an ammonite, a fossil of those spiral-shape cephalopods that to many symbolize paleontology itself. The fossilization process had turned ...

About 201 million years ago, at the close of a geological period called the Triassic, one of the worst mass extinctions in ...

How did the woolly mammoth, an ambassador of the Ice Age, end up confined to modern-day Wrangel Island? And what ultimately caused their extinction? New evidence suggests it wasn’t poor genetics as ...

The dodo is often viewed as the classic example of extinction and obsolescence. However, the truth is that countless species have met similar fates. Here’s one bird whose epoch ended much in the same ...

Jackson Ryan was CNET's science editor, and a multiple award-winning one at that. Earlier, he'd been a scientist, but he realized he wasn't very happy sitting at a lab bench all day. Science writing, ...

Humans have long tinkered with the evolutionary trajectories of other species. Thousands of years ago we tamed wolves into dogs and transformed a wild grass into the agricultural wonder wheat. Within ...