Tomkins and his team reconstructed an unusual rise in the number of meteorite impacts known as the Ordovician impact spike, ...

Ordovician reefs were also home to large sea lilies, relatives of sea stars. Anchored to the bottom inside calcareous tubes, they collected food particles with feathery arms that waved in the ...

Manitoba is well-known for its fossil record, including the fossil-filled, world-famous Ordovician-aged Tyndall Stone and the ...

The researchers' idea that Earth once had rings comes from reconstructions of Earth's plate tectonics from the Ordovician period—which ran between 485.4 million years and 443.8 million years ago ...

If you were to look up from Earth some 466 million years ago, you might have seen a gleaming ring stretching across the sky, some scientists say.

The "Big Five" mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic Eon have long attracted significant attention from the geoscience community and the public. Among them, the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME ...

Long before the dawn of humans, dinosaurs, insects or even trees, a cascade of unfortunate events threatened to end life on earth. During the Ordovician Period, around 485 to 444 million years ago, ...

New Theory for What Caused Earth's Second-Largest Mass Extinction. Scientists have been trying to unravel what killed nearly all of Earth’s animals 400 million years ago.

Specifically, the findings support the hypothesis that supernovae could have triggered two of the so-called "big five" mass extinctions: those at the end of the Ordovician Period, some 445 million ...

The Ordovician was a critical time in the history of life when extraordinary diversification of animals occurred and more familiar ecosystems like coral reefs began to appear at the end of the period.