How Many Mass Extinctions Have There Been?
There have supposedly been five “mass extinctions” in Earth’s history, but the real story is more complex than that.
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Show Notes
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Mass Extinction Event: a significant, global decrease in the diversity of life
- "Big 5": The five biggest mass extinction events since the Cambrian explosion of Life 550 million years ago
- Biodiversity Crisis: Like a mass extinction, a biodiversity crisis is a marked depletion in diversity in the fossil record. Some scientists prefer to call the late-Devonian extinction a "biodiversity crisis" because a lack of speciation contributed to the loss in diversity just as much as extinction did.
- Diversity curve: A line chart that shows the diversity of life (usually by genera, but sometimes by species or family) over time
- Lagerstatte: a deposit of sedimentary rock that contains a profound number of fossils, often with excellent preservation
- Shareholder Quorum Subsampling: A statistical method that corrects for some of the biases in the fossil record, allowing scientists to generate more accurate diversity curves
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