Latest Extinction Is the Greatest

September 3, 2008 at 12:00 am PT

Earth may be in the midst of the greatest extinction ever, according to a new mass extinction scoring system. “The current extinction resembles none of the earlier ones, and may end up being the greatest of all,” write Istanbul Technical University researchers A. M. Celal Sengor, Saniye Atayman and Sinan Ozeren. Their system, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attempts to quantify those periods when more than half of all species disappeared.

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Tagged with: Brandon Keim, extinction, Wired

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