There are more than 8 billion humans on the planet, and although that's a remarkable number, it's just a fraction of the number of people who have ever lived and an even smaller slice of the total ...

Over 70 new species, from insects to dinosaurs, were identified in 2025 by combining fieldwork, museum collections, and ...

The biggest animal to ever live on Earth wasn’t a dinosaur — and scientists just found its remains. The discovery happened in ...

Nilpena Ediacara National Park in South Australia is well known for its collection of fossils from the Ediacaran period—a geologic timespan that predates the Cambrian explosion. An international team ...

New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is. Some 4 billion ...

Very few species on Earth today are considered “living fossils”–species that have survived over hundreds of millions of years, remaining more or less unchanged compared to their distant ancestors.

Do animals play a larger role in shaping the Earth’s surface than geological processes like flooding, wind, fire, and landslides? This is what a recent study published in Proceedings of the National ...

Scientists have estimated how many cells have occupied Earth since the origin of life on the planet. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

"This is the story of Earth like you’ve never seen it before—from the first spark of life to prehistoric monsters to the rise of humans… and all the weird stuff in between." We live on a magnificently ...

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...

To figure out this mind-bogglingly high number, we need to know how many species have ever lived, dig deep into the fossil record and do a lot of math. When you purchase through links on our site, we ...