When Sudan the white rhino was put down by his carers earlier this year, it confirmed the extinction of one of the savannah’s most iconic subspecies. Despite decades of effort from conservationists, ...

Biodiversity underpins ecosystem functioning, human welfare and planetary resilience. Yet current rates of species decline and population losses far exceed those of the geological past, signalling an ...

Grief for an animal at the end of its life is unlike any other emotion. It cleaves a depthless void that feels empty and hollow. It’s a feeling that animal keepers and caretakers know well, but it’s ...

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 ...

The history of life on Earth has been punctuated by several mass extinctions, the greatest of these being the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as the Great Dying, which occurred 252 ...

The term “de-extinction” often conjures images of Jurassic Park-style genetic manipulation, complete with ethical dilemmas and ecological chaos. But the reality of functional de-extinction—the ...

Global calamities like the one that doomed most dinosaurs forever alter the varieties of life found on Earth, but new research shows that it doesn't take a catastrophe to end entire lineages. An ...

"We should never forget that it is these personal struggles that make up the extinction process ... Extinction is not a cold calculus about the numbers of breeding females and the degree of genetic ...