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Halfway There
Anthony D. Barnosky
I’m a paleontologist, so when I think of extinction, I think big. The Big 5, to be exact. The Big 5 refers to five — and only five — extremely unusual times in the past 550 million years. Times when at least 75% of Earth’s species went extinct in a geological instant. That’s what people really mean when they say the words “mass extinction.”
Anthony Barnosky is the author of Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming, Island Press, 2009, and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also holds appointments at the Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
www. ib.berkeley.edu/
www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/
mvz. berkeley.edu/
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