How Many Mass Extinctions Have There Been?
Thanks to Audible for supporting this video. Get your free 30-day trial at https://www.audible.com/minuteearth Thanks also to our Patreon patrons: Today I Found Out, Maarten Bremer, Mark Roth,...
==========
In the 1970s, a scientist named Jack Sepkoski embarked on the most ambitious fossil hunt ever – but instead of digging in the dirt, he dug through dusty piles of academic research and scraped together a record of all the ocean-dwelling creatures known to science. It was tedious work, but the data it yielded gave rise to perhaps the most famous chart in paleontology — a tally of marine life over time that revealed five catastrophic, global biodiversity crashes in Earth’s past. Those crashes, known as the “Big Five” mass extinctions, are commonly believed to have been the biggest die-offs in Earth’s history, both in and out of the oceans. They include that time 66 million years ago when a huge meteorite took out the non-avian dinosaurs, as well ...
==========
In the 1970s, a scientist named Jack Sepkoski embarked on the most ambitious fossil hunt ever – but instead of digging in the dirt, he dug through dusty piles of academic research and scraped together a record of all the ocean-dwelling creatures known to science. It was tedious work, but the data it yielded gave rise to perhaps the most famous chart in paleontology — a tally of marine life over time that revealed five catastrophic, global biodiversity crashes in Earth’s past. Those crashes, known as the “Big Five” mass extinctions, are commonly believed to have been the biggest die-offs in Earth’s history, both in and out of the oceans. They include that time 66 million years ago when a huge meteorite took out the non-avian dinosaurs, as well ...
