When the Kinks' Ray Davies penned the tune 'Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,' the vanishing locomotives stood as nostalgic symbols of a simpler English life. But for a paleontologist, the replacement ...

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 ...

In 2020, Oxford-based philosopher Toby Ord published a book called The Precipice about the risk of human extinction. He put the chances of “existential catastrophe” for our species during the next ...

Ancient sea organisms survived until a sudden extinction 550 million years ago, revealing what may be the first major mass extinction.

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 ...

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 ...

Nello Cristianini is the author of "The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us", published by CRC Press, 2023. Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority ...