Learn about the climate changes that followed the end-Permian extinction, allowing select species to take over the planet's ...

After Earth's worst mass extinction, surviving ocean animals spread worldwide. Stanford's model shows why this happened.

About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, something killed some 90 percent of the planet's species. Less than 5 percent of the animal species in the seas survived. On land ...

Scientists don't call it the "Great Dying" for nothing. About 252 million years ago, upward of 80% of all marine species ...

These toughened-up creatures represented a crucial innovation ... the world's oceans until they were wiped out in the Permian extinctions about 250 million years ago. Photograph by James L.

Toward the end of the Permian period, the planet was reeling ... where the die-offs of certain predator and competitor creatures allow one surviving group of organisms to go gangbusters.