One of Earth’s earliest mass extinctions wiped out most ocean life during a sudden global ice age. From the ruins, jawed vertebrates survived, diversified, and transformed the course of evolution.

During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots separated by large areas of deep ocean. In these zones, surviving jawed ...

A rapid climate collapse during the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction devastated ocean life and reshuffled Earth’s ecosystems.

Back when the Earth was crawling with trilobites and other strange shelled creatures, our planet may have had a ring just like Saturn's. This ancient ring system is thought to have formed about 466 ...

The Ordovician period offers a detailed window into early marine ecosystems and climatic transitions, with palynology and microfossil biostratigraphy serving as key tools in reconstructing these ...

One of Earth's most consequential bursts of biodiversity—a 30-million-year period of explosive evolutionary changes spawning innumerable new species—may have the most modest of creatures to thank for ...

The fall in jawless vertebrates coincides with the rise of jawed vertebrates following the two pulses of the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME). Top genus-level diversity curves follow global, ...

Geological evidence, including an Ordovician-era increase in earthquakes, tsunamis, meteorites, and crater formation, suggests a significant celestial event approximately 466 million years ago. A ...

A systematic re-evaluation of China’s Ordovician tectonic architecture, published in the Journal of Palaeogeography (Chinese Edition), proposes a refined model dividing the region into four ...

Today, only the largest planets in the solar system have rings, but a new study suggests Earth may have been a ringed planet in the distant past. Scientists studying the geology of the Ordovician ...