Hazards to life itself, at least on Earth.
Not to take anything away from evolution, but extinction may be the more worthy scientific problem, because whereas we've already evolved, we haven't learned to save ourselves.
New evidence and old converges on a volcanic explanation for "the great dying."
This colorfully named situation underlies several known episodes of mass extinction.
If you're science-literate, you may hold your nose at the movie "Dinosaur." But I submit that if you ignore its distortion of the geologic facts, its deeper message on extinction is worthy of contemplation.
The Hooper Virtual Paleontological Museum hosts this extensive survey of extinction events from the Proterozoic to the Holocene, without the most recent developments.
A surprisingly deep resource, this set of pages from Enchanted Learning's Zoom School gets well into the science without making it ponderous.
Dewey McLean, an early and untiring opponent of the impact theory, has his say here, along with comments on the unfair role of the scientific press.
This mysterious extinction event is discussed at the end of this class lecture from Columbia University.
A 1996 presentation by NASA scientist Owen Toon sums up the physicist's viewpoint. Lots of damage estimates and frequency estimates, nothing about the fossil record.
Steven Self and Mike Rampino present the eruption hypothesis of mass extinction on the Geological Society's Web site.
David Ulansey raises a hue and cry on this page, a long list of links documenting the current wave of human-caused extinctions.
A paper from a Santa Fe Institute researcher shoots down the theory that mass extinctions just happen due to "coevolutionary avalanches."
The quagga, the passenger pigeon, the aurochs . . . just three of the recently extinct species that Steve Warmack has documented in touching detail.
A thorough, even-handed treatment of the question from the University of California Museum of Paleontology.
A series of
New Scientist articles about the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous presents bits of research as they happened.
