The world has already ended, five times, maybe more.

Can we talk about just a few of Earth's worst moments?

Like, let's just talk about a couple of times when like, it was pretty, pretty bad.

Uh, yeah, so rotting oceans filled with poison gas, hypercans, hurricanes with 500 mile

hour winds, enough lava that it could cover the lower 48 United States, a kilometer deep.

Jesus.

Enough to cause a mass extinction, enough to wipe out 90% of the world's species.

The end of the world for nearly all life on Earth.

So maybe not the end end, but a pretty close shape.

There's a thing called a fungal spike at the mass extinction where it looks like there's

these little spores of fungus everywhere all over the planet.

Literally things just rotting everywhere.

Someone has written that you could walk around the entire world without seeing a tree

and the early Triassic.

Um, I mean, it's really, it's really hard.

That's bad.

And that is only the beginning.

I'm Dylan Thurus, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places.

Today, science writer Peter Brannon will take us on a tour of the world's five major mass

extinctions.

Our stops include a Walmart parking lot, the side of a highway, under a pier in Boston

...