Although putative corals of uncertain affinities occur in the early Cambrian, the earliest definite tabulate corals have not been described prior to the Early Ordovician in North America. This paper ...

Fossils from 465 million years ago recently discovered in Portugal have revealed the huge size reached by trilobites, the most diverse group of extinct marine arthropods. Geologists describe the ...

From the beginning of the Ordovician, marine life began its great radiation, which was characterized by the rapid appearance of new orders, families, and genera, together with the replacement of ...

This column is part of a series where Verge staffers post highly subjective reviews of animals. Up until now, we’ve written about animals without telling you whether they suck or rule. We are now ...

Gabe Allen is a Colorado-based freelance journalist focused on science and the environment. He is a 2023 reporting fellow with the Pulitzer Center and a current master's student at the University of ...

Subsurface Ordovician rocks in the Black Warrior Basin, Mississippi Embayment, and the eastern part of the Arkoma Basin reflect a different depositional history than coeval rocks exposed in the ...

JUST over half a billion years ago, evolution hit a purple patch. In the space of a few million years, once-empty seas were suddenly overrun by all manner of newfangled life forms. Animals had arrived ...

Over half a billion years ago, during the Cambrian geological period, life on Earth started to get a lot more interesting. Thanks to the rise in free oxygen generated mostly by photosynthesizing algae ...

Some mass extinctions unfold like a sloppy murder, leaving clear fingerprints for the keen investigator to uncover. (Asteroids are no masters of subtlety.) The Late Ordovician mass extinction, the ...