Flies evolved before dinosaurs—and survived an apocalyptic world after the Permian extinction Tiny, short-lived gnats may be tougher than they seem. By Sara Kiley Watson ...

Explore the possible causes of the Permian extinction and how life recovered. ... Belles, Xavier. "Origin and Evolution of Insect Metamorphosis." Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, ...

Long before T. rex, the Earth was dominated by super-carnivores stranger and more terrifying than anything dreamed up by ...

Researchers have uncovered what may be the oldest physical evidence of butterflies or moths, hidden inside a 236-million-year-old coprolite—fossilized feces—recovered from Talampaya National Park in ...

The Permian extinction reminds him of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, in which a corpse with 12 knife wounds is discovered on a train. Twelve different killers conspired to slay ...

A new study reveals that a region in China's Turpan-Hami Basin served as a refugium, or "life oasis," for terrestrial plants ...

Extreme climate shifts long ago may have helped drive reptile evolution. A mass extinction 252 million years ago was only one reason Triassic reptiles rose to dominance ...

The Permian-Triassic extinction event, as it is known, is thought to have resulted from an intense period of volcanic activity that spewed out vast quantities of greenhouse gases, ash and other ...

It was thought that they evolved from land-dwelling ancestors after the mass extinction. The new fossils are 11 vertebrae and 15 bone fragments found in Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island in the Arctic.

Before this extinction at the end of the Permian Period—now known as the “Great Dying”—creatures called synapsids, the precursors to mammals, dominated the Earth.