Extinction rates have slowed across many plant and animal groups, despite claims that the planet is experiencing another “mass extinction”.
New research from the University of Arizona unexpectedly found that extinctions in plants, arthropods and land vertebrates peaked around 100 years ago, and have since declined.
Published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the paper analysed rates and patterns of 912 species that went extinct over the past 500 years.
It found that suggestions of a current mass extinction in previous studies have relied on projecting past extinctions into the future. However, this ignores differences in the factors driving extinctions in the past, present and future.
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