Human activities are driving rapid environmental change and accelerating species extinction rates, raising concerns that Earth may be entering a sixth mass extinction. To address today’s global ecological challenges and make informed decisions about biodiversity conservation, we must first understand how life has responded to major environmental changes in the prehistoric past. The fossil record provides the only direct evidence of past extinction events that have shaped the history of life. In this course, we will examine how the fossil record came to be and how we use multidisciplinary scientific methods to interpret it and reconstruct Earth’s history. We will explore how life and environments in the oceans and on land have changed throughout deep time, with particular emphasis on the causes and consequences of the "Big Five" and other past extinction events. We will also consider human origins, the environmental and ecological consequences of our ancestors' spread from Africa across the globe, and how human beings continue to reshape life on our planet in unprecedented ways. By tracing how life has endured and recovered from past episodes of climate change and extinction, we will discuss what the fossil record can teach us about the resilience of life and the future of biodiversity.