In school, we learned about the asteroid that wiped out an estimated 76% of all creatures. Scientists now call this the fifth ...

By Rhett Ayers Butler [( In 1991, botanists Calaway Dodson and Alwyn Gentry advanced a striking proposition. Surveying a ...

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 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 ...

The Xerces Blue butterfly (Glaucopsyche xerces) was native to the coastal dunes of San Francisco, in the United States. As the city grew, much of the butterfly’s habitat was destroyed and its ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. There’s an important concept in evolutionary biology called ...

Great auks (Pinguinus impennis) were large flightless birds that thrived on rocky islands in the North Atlantic for thousands of years. However, humans hunted them to extinction within just a few ...

New research finds that the fertility rate needed to sustain a population is much higher than once thought, especially when sex ratios or mortality rates shift. This raises important questions for ...