The largest known effusive eruptions during the Cenozoic and Mesozoic Eras, the voluminous flood basalts, have long been suspected as being associated with major extinctions of biotic species. Despite the possible errors attached to the dates in both time series of events, the significance level of the suspected correlation is found here, by an objective, direct method, to be 1% to 4%. Statistically, extinctions lag eruptions by a mean time interval that is indistinguishable from zero, being much less than the average residual derived from the correlation analysis. Oceanic flood basalts, however, must have had a different biological impact, which is still uncertain owing to the small number of known examples and differing physical factors. Although not all continental flood basalts can have produced major extinction events, the non‐correlating eruptions (including most or all of the oceanic flood basalts) may have led to smaller marine extinciton events that terminated at least some of the less catastrophically ending geologic stages. Consequently, the 26 Myr quasiperiodicity seen in major marine extinctions may be only a sampling effect, rather than a manifestation of underlying periodicity.