The researchers' idea that Earth once had rings comes from reconstructions of Earth's plate tectonics from the Ordovician period—which ran between 485.4 million years and 443.8 million years ago ...

If you were to look up from Earth some 466 million years ago, you might have seen a gleaming ring stretching across the sky, some scientists say.

The "Big Five" mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic Eon have long attracted significant attention from the geoscience community and the public. Among them, the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME ...

Ordovician reefs were also home to large sea lilies, relatives of sea stars. Anchored to the bottom inside calcareous tubes, they collected food particles with feathery arms that waved in the ...

JUST over half a billion years ago, evolution hit a purple patch. In the space of a few million years, once-empty seas were suddenly overrun by all manner of newfangled life forms. Animals had ...

The Late Ordovician mass extinction, the oldest of all and the second most lethal, isn’t one of them. Though there is a standard explanation for this granddaddy of death — involving an ancient ice age ...

The Ordovician period, from which the fossil likely came from, lasted 45 million years, starting 488 million years ago and ending 443 million years ago.

The Late Ordovician period, ending 444 million years ago, was marked by the onset of glaciations. The expansion of non-vascular land plants accelerated chemical weathering and may have drawn down ...

The Ordovician Radiation, also called the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), saw a quadrupling of diversity at the genus level (that's the category one step above species).

Toward the end of the Ordovician, Earth underwent widespread glaciation. That could have caused the shallow seas to disappear, which provided optimal conditions for a variety of organisms.