The Conversation

What is a 'mass extinction' and are we in one now?

Author: Frédérik Saltré, Research Fellow in Ecology, Flinders University

Humans are probably causing what ice ages and asteroids caused before them.Keith Roper/Flickr, CC BY-SA

For more than 3.5 billion years, living organisms have thrived, multiplied and diversified to occupy every ecosystem on Earth. The flip side to this explosion of new species is that species extinctions have also always been part of the...

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