It’s a thing that has ticked me off and that i often see on wikipedia or scientific papers when reading about extinction events.
There’ll often be sentences like: “Earth’s largest extinction killed 57% of all families, 83% of all genera and 90% to 96% of all species”
Does the “all species” mean that 90% of biologically different species died, or that 90% of individuals died?
In: 1
species. We don’t have great ways to estimate the number of individuals of a species on earth in the past (other than seeing that, say, Species A shows up a lot more than Species B), but we can more easily count how many *species* are found before a line in the rock but not after.
Latest Answers