Everything has its pecking order, and geology is no exception. The cocks of the rocks are the big, swaggering periods of the past that fill books, television programmes and natural-history museums.

The question at the heart of a long-standing paleontological mystery solved Wednesday reads like the premise of a Dan Brown novel: How could a 1800s hermit, fossilized footprints collected in the ...

With life must come death; with evolution must come extinction. You’ve certainly heard of the asteroid that nearly wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but the most outstanding destructive ...