China is the world's largest coal consumer, and has the most serious coal and rock dynamic disasters. In China, with the development of deep mining in recent years, the characteristics of strong adsorption and low permeability of coal seams are becoming more and more obvious. The coupling effects of high crustal stress, high gas pressure and low permeability are stronger under the influence of mining disturbance. The risks of coal-gas compound dynamic disasters are increasingly aggravating, and the compound dynamic disasters are becoming major threats to the safety of the coal mining. It is a hot and difficult issue to understand the mechanism of the coal-gas compound dynamic disasters and then to predict and control them. The aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive review of the research on the coal-gas compound dynamic disasters in the past 30 years. In this review article, the occurrence laws and failure characteristics of coal-gas compound disasters were investigated. Moreover, the mechanism, classifications, typical case analysis, prediction and prevention of coal-gas compound dynamic disasters were summarized and discussed. Lastly, the urgent problems and directions in future research were proposed. It is expected to have a substantial guiding significance for the mechanism study of coal-gas compound dynamic disasters. (C) 2019 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.