5 Major Extinctions—And One More We May Be Causing Right Now

For everything on Earth, there has been a season: A time for continents to meet, a time for them to break apart, a time for warming and a time for cooling, a time for life to thrive and species to multiply—and a time for them to get obliterated by global catastrophes. Scientists generally recognize five major extinction events when, in very short order (on a geological timescale, anyway), much of life on Earth was utterly stomped into the fossil record. Here’s a look at the five major extinction events of epochs past, and a glimpse at the sixth one we might be causing right now.

Sources:

• “Late Devonian Mass Extinction,” Natural History Museum
• “The Five Worst Mass Extinctions,” Endangered Species International
• “Big Five mass extinction events,” BBC
• “End-Triassic extinction,” Encyclopedia Britannica
• “Table 1: The ‘Big Five’ mass extinction events,” Nature

This article originally appeared on World Science Festival