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.

Learn how fossils from Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park revealed that a Late Triassic crocodile relative may have ...

The mass extinction that ended the Permian geological epoch, 252 million years ago, wiped out most animals living on Earth. Huge volcanoes erupted, releasing 100,000 billion metric tons of carbon ...