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The following list is incomplete by necessity, since the majority of extinctions are thought to be undocumented, and for many others there isn't a definitive, widely accepted last, or most recent record. According to the species-area theory, the present rate of extinction may be up to 140,000 species per year. [1]
The first known mass extinction was the Great Oxidation Event 2.4 billion years ago, which killed most of the planet's obligate anaerobes. Researchers have identified five other major extinction events in Earth's history, with estimated losses below: [11] End Ordovician: 440 million years ago, 86% of all species lost, including graptolites
The largest extinction was the Kellwasser Event (Frasnian - Famennian, or F-F, 372 Ma), an extinction event at the end of the Frasnian, about midway through the Late Devonian. This extinction annihilated coral reefs and numerous tropical benthic (seabed-living) animals such as jawless fish, brachiopods, and trilobites.
These extinctions were staggered over tens of thousands of years, spanning from around 50,000 years Before Present (BP) to around 10,000 years BP, with temperate adapted species like the straight-tusked elephant and the narrow-nosed rhinoceros generally going extinct earlier than cold adapted species like the woolly mammoth and woolly ...
The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event, [ a ] also known as the K–T extinction, [ b ] was the mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth [ 2 ][ 3 ] approximately 66 million years ago. The event caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. Most other tetrapods weighing more than 25 kilograms ...
Mass extinctions are characterized by the loss of at least 75% of species within a geologically short period of time (i.e., less than 2 million years). [18] [51] The Holocene extinction is also known as the "sixth extinction", as it is possibly the sixth mass extinction event, after the Ordovician–Silurian extinction events, the Late Devonian extinction, the Permian–Triassic extinction ...
The Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME), sometimes known as the end-Ordovician mass extinction or the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, is the first of the "big five" major mass extinction events in Earth's history, occurring roughly 445 million years ago (Ma). [1] It is often considered to be the second-largest known extinction event just ...
Extinction is the termination of a taxon by the death of its last member. A taxon may become functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to reproduce and recover. Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively.