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More than 90% of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth, are extinct. 

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More than 90% of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth, are extinct. 

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More than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. As new species evolve to fit ever changing ecological niches, older species fade away. But the rate of extinction is far from constant. At least a handful of times in the last 500 million years, 75 to more than 90 percent of all species on Earth have disappeared in a geological blink of an eye in catastrophes we call mass extinctions.

Though mass extinctions are deadly events, they open up the planet for new forms of life to emerge. The most studied mass extinction, which marked the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods about 66 million years ago, killed off the nonavian dinosaurs and made room for mammals and birds to rapidly diversify and evolve.

Though the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction is famous for being caused mainly by a huge asteroid, it's the exception. The single biggest driver of mass extinctions appears to be major changes in Earth's carbon cycle such as large igneous province eruptions, huge volcanoes that flooded hundreds of thousands of square miles with lava. These eruptions ejected massive amounts of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, enabling runaway global warming and related effects such as ocean acidification and anoxia, a loss of dissolved oxygen in water.

Ordovician-Silurian extinction - 444 million years ago

The Ordovician period, from 485 to 444 million years ago, was a time of dramatic changes for life on Earth. Over a 30-million-year stretch, species diversity blossomed, but as the period ended, the first known mass extinction struck. At that time, massive glaciation locked up huge amounts of water in an ice cap that covered parts of a large south polar landmass. The icy onslaught may have been triggered by the rise of North America's Appalachian Mountains. The large-scale weathering of these freshly uplifted rocks sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and drastically cooled the planet.

As a result, sea levels plummeted by hundreds of feet. Creatures living in shallow waters would have seen their habitats cool and shrink dramatically, dealing a major blow. Whatever life remained recovered haltingly in chemically hostile waters: Once sea levels started to rise again, marine oxygen levels fell, which in turn caused ocean waters to more readily hold onto dissolved toxic metals.

The second worst mass extinction known to science, this event killed an estimated 85 percent of all species. The event took its hardest toll on marine organisms such as corals, shelled brachiopods, eel-like creatures called conodonts, and the trilobites.

Late Devonian extinction - 383-359 million years ago

Starting 383 million years ago, this extinction event eliminated about 75 percent of all species on Earth over a span of roughly 20 million years.

In several pulses across the Devonian, ocean oxygen levels dropped precipitously, which dealt serious blows to conodonts and ancient shelled relatives of squid and octopuses called goniatites. The worst of these pulses, called the Kellwasser event, came about 372 million years ago. Rocks from the period in what's now Germany show that as oxygen levels plummeted, many reef-building creatures died out, including a major group of sea sponges called the stromatoporoids.

It's been hard to nail down the cause for the late Devonian extinction pulses, but volcanism is a possible trigger: Within a couple million years of the Kellwasser event, a large igneous province called the Viluy Traps erupted 240,000 cubic miles of lava in what is now Siberia. The eruption would have spewed greenhouse gases and sulfur dioxide, which can cause acid rain. Asteroids may also have contributed. Sweden's 32-mile-wide Siljan crater, one of Earth's biggest surviving impact craters, formed about 377 million years ago.

Though it may sound surprising, land plants may have been accessories to the crime. During the Devonian, plants hit on several winning adaptations, including the stem-strengthening compound lignin and a full-fledged vascular structure. These traits allowed plants to get bigger-and for their roots to get deeper-than ever before, which would have increased the rate of rock weathering.

The faster rocks weathered, the more excess nutrients flowed from land into the oceans. The influx would have triggered algae growth, and when these algae died, their decay removed oxygen from the oceans to form what are known as dead zones. In addition, the spread of trees would have sucked CO ₂ out of the atmosphere, potentially ushering in global cooling.

To add to the puzzle, not only did some creatures go extinct during the late Devonian, but species diversification slowed down during this time. The slowdown may have been caused by the global spread of invasive species, as high sea levels let creatures from previously isolated marine habitats mix and mingle, which let ecosystems around the world homogenize.

Permian-Triassic extinction - 252 million years ago

Some 252 million years ago, life on Earth faced the "Great Dying": the Permian-Triassic extinction. The cataclysm was the single worst event life on Earth has ever experienced. Over about 60,000 years, 96 percent of all marine species and about three of every four species on land died out. The world's forests were wiped out and didn't come back in force until about 10 million years later. Of the five mass extinctions, the Permian-Triassic is the only one that wiped out large numbers of insect species. Marine ecosystems took four to eight million years to recover. ( Find out more about the devastation of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.)

The extinction's single biggest cause is the Siberian Traps, an immense volcanic complex that erupted more than 720,000 cubic miles of lava across what is now Siberia. The eruption triggered the release of at least 14.5 trillion tons of carbon, more than 2.5 times what'd be unleashed if every last ounce of fossil fuel on Earth were dug up and burned. Adding insult to injury, magma from the Siberian Traps infiltrated coal basins on its way toward the surface, probably releasing even more greenhouse gases such as methane.

The resulting global warming was downright hellish. In the million years after the event, seawater and soil temperatures rose between 25 to 34 degrees Fahrenheit. By 250.5 million years ago, sea surface temperatures at the Equator got as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a hot tub's standard maximum temperature. At the time, almost no fish lived near the Equator.

As temperatures rose, rocks on land weathered more rapidly, hastened by acid rain that formed from volcanic sulfur. Just as in the late Devonian, increased weathering would have brought on anoxia that suffocated the oceans. Climate models suggest that at the time, the oceans lost an estimated 76 percent of their oxygen inventory. These models also suggest that the warming and oxygen loss account for most of the extinction's species losses.

Triassic-Jurassic extinction - 201 million years ago

Life took a long time to recover from the Great Dying, but once it did, it diversified rapidly. Different reef-building creatures began to take hold, and lush vegetation covered the land, setting the stage for a group of reptiles called the archosaurs: the forerunners of birds, crocodilians, pterosaurs, and the nonavian dinosaurs. But about 201 million years ago, life endured another major blow: the sudden loss of up to 80 percent of all land and marine species.

At the end of the Triassic, Earth warmed an average of between 5 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit, driven by a quadrupling of atmospheric CO ₂ levels. This was probably triggered by huge amounts of greenhouse gases from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, a large igneous province in central Pangaea, the supercontinent at the time. Remnants of those ancient lava flows are now split across eastern South America, eastern North America, and West Africa. The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province was enormous. Its lava volume could cover the continental U.S. in a quarter-mile of rock.

The uptick in CO ₂ acidified the Triassic oceans, making it more difficult for marine creatures to build their shells from calcium carbonate. On land, the dominant vertebrates had been the crocodilians, which were bigger and far more diverse than they are today. Many of them died out. In their wake, the earliest dinosaurs-small, nimble creatures on the ecological periphery-rapidly diversified.

Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction - 66 million years ago

The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event is the most recent mass extinction and the only one definitively connected to a major asteroid impact. Some 76 percent of all species on the planet, including all nonavian dinosaurs, went extinct.

One day about 66 million years ago, an asteroid roughly 7.5 miles across slammed into the waters off of what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula at 45,000 miles an hour. The massive impact-which left a crater more than 120 miles wide-flung huge volumes of dust, debris, and sulfur into the atmosphere, bringing on severe global cooling. Wildfires ignited any land within 900 miles of the impact, and a huge tsunami rippled outward from the impact. Overnight, the ecosystems that supported nonavian dinosaurs began to collapse. ( Learn more about the last day of the dinosaurs' reign.)

Global warming fueled by volcanic eruptions at the Deccan Flats in India may have aggravated the event. Some scientists even argue that some of the Deccan Flats eruptions could have been triggered by the impact.

Extinction today

Earth is currently experiencing a biodiversity crisis. Recent estimates suggest that extinction threatens up to a million species of plants and animals, in large part because of human activities such as deforestation, hunting, and overfishing. Other serious threats include the spread of invasive species and diseases from human trade, as well as pollution and human-caused climate change. ( Explore National Geographic magazine's special issue on extinction.)

Today, extinctions are occurring hundreds of times faster than they would naturally. If all species currently designated as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable go extinct in the next century, and if that rate of extinction continues without slowing down, we could approach the level of a mass extinction in as soon as 240 to 540 years.

Climate change presents a long-term threat. Humans' burning of fossil fuels has let us chemically imitate large igneous provinces, through the injection of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other gases into Earth's atmosphere each year. By total volume, these past volcanoes emitted far more than humans do today; the Siberian Traps released more than 1,400 times the CO ₂ than humans did in 2018 from burning fossil fuels for energy. However, humans are emitting greenhouse gases as fast as-or even faster than-the Siberian Traps, and Earth's climate is rapidly changing as a result.

As mass extinctions show us, sudden climate change can be profoundly disruptive. And while we haven't yet crossed the 75-percent threshold of a mass extinction, that doesn't mean things are fine. Well before hitting that grim marker, the damage would throw the ecosystems we call home into chaos, jeopardizing species around the world-including us.

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Mass extinction facts and information from National Geographic

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More than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. As new species evolve to fit ever changing ecological niches, older species fade away. But the rate of extinction is far from constant.

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There are now 41,415 species on the IUCN Red List, and 16,306 of them are endangered species threatened with extinction. This is up from 16,118 last year. This includes both endangered animals and endangered plants.

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How Wolves Changed the Ecosystem

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On a quiet spring morning, a resounding "Slap!" reverberates through the air above a remote stream leading to Lake Yellowstone. Over much of the past century, it has been a rarely heard noise in the soundscape that is Yellowstone National Park, but today is growing more common-the sound of a beaver slapping its tail on the water as a warning to other beavers.

When the grey wolf was reintroduced into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 1995, there was only one beaver colony in the park, said Doug Smith, a wildlife biologist in charge of the Yellowstone Wolf Project.

Today, the park is home to nine beaver colonies, with the promise of more to come, as the reintroduction of wolves continues to astonish biologists with a ripple of direct and indirect consequences throughout the ecosystem.

A flourishing beaver population is just one of those consequences, said Smith.

A Yellowstone Beaver's Tale of Elk

What happened, said Smith, is that the presence of wolves triggered a still-unfolding cascade effect among animals and plants-one that will take decades of research to understand.

"It is like kicking a pebble down a mountain slope where conditions were just right that a falling pebble could trigger an avalanche of change," Smith mused.

So how did this avalanche of change work out for the beaver?

To answer that, you have to go back to the 1930s, when the wolf was killed off in Yellowstone. Even though Yellowstone elk were still preyed upon by black and grizzly bears, cougars and, to a lesser extent, coyotes, the absence of wolves took a huge amount of predatory pressure off the elk, said Smith. As a result, elk populations did very well-perhaps too well. Two things happened: the elk pushed the limits of Yellowstone's carrying capacity, and they didn't move around much in the winter-browsing heavily on young willow, aspen and cottonwood plants. That was tough for beaver, who need willows to survive in winter.

Healthier Willow Stands in Yellowstone

This created a counterintuitive situation. Back in 1968, said Smith, when the elk population was about a third what it is today, the willow stands along streams were in bad shape. Today, with three times as many elk, willow stands are robust. Why? Because the predatory pressure from wolves keeps elk on the move, so they don't have time to intensely browse the willow.

Indeed, a research project headed by the U.S. Geological Survey in Fort Collins found that the combination of intense elk browsing on willows and simulated beaver cuttings produced stunted willow stands. Conversely, simulated beaver cutting without elk browsing produced verdant, healthy stands of willow. In the three-year experiment, willow stem biomass was 10 times greater on unbrowsed plants than on browsed plants. Unbrowsed plants recovered 84 percent of their pre-cut biomass after only two growing seasons, whereas browsed plants recovered only 6 percent.

With elk on the move during the winter, willow stands recovered from intense browsing, and beaver rediscovered an abundant food source that hadn't been there earlier.

As the beavers spread and built new dams and ponds, the cascade effect continued, said Smith. Beaver dams have multiple effects on stream hydrology. They even out the seasonal pulses of runoff; store water for recharging the water table; and provide cold, shaded water for fish, while the now robust willow stands provide habitat for songbirds.

"What we're finding is that ecosystems are incredibly complex," he said. In addition to wolves changing the feeding habits of elk, the rebound of the beaver in Yellowstone may also have been affected by the 1988 Yellowstone fires, the ongoing drought, warmer and drier winters and other factors yet to be discovered, Smith said.

Yellowstone Wolf Trophic Cascade

Biologists are often faced with the grim task of documenting the cascade effects of what happens when a species is removed from an ecosystem, by local extirpation or even extinction. In Yellowstone, biologists have the rare, almost unique, opportunity to document what happens when an ecosystem becomes whole again, what happens when a key species is added back into the ecosystem equation.

"In the entire scientific literature, there are only five or six comparable circumstances," Smith said. "What we're seeing now is a feeding frenzy of scientific research."

Scott Creel, an ecology professor at Montana State University, is hip-deep in that feeding frenzy.

"My research has been in the Gallatin Canyon," said Creel, where elk inhabit four drainages. Wolves come and go, he said, enabling him to study what elk do in the presence and absence of wolves.

"Elk have proven to be pretty adaptable," Creel said. "When wolves are around, they're more vigilant and do less foraging."

Elk move into heavy timber when wolves are around, Creel added, but return to the grassy, open meadows when wolves go away. Creel and other researchers are still working out what that means in terms of the elk's diet and whether there are costs associated with this behavior.

Rather surprisingly, elk herd size breaks up into smaller units when wolves are around, said Creel, who had expected herd size to get bigger as a defense mechanism. "I think they're trying to avoid encounters with wolves," he said, by being more vigilant, moving into the timber and gathering in smaller herd units.

Yellowstone Wolves are Food Distributors

Researchers have also determined that wolves, in the recent absence of hard winters, are now the primary reason for elk mortality. Before wolf reintroduction, deep snows were the main determinant of whether an elk was going to die.

Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley determined that the combination of less snow and more wolves has benefited scavengers both big and small, from ravens to grizzly bears.

Instead of a boom and bust cycle of elk carrion availability-as existed before wolves and when winters were harder-there's now a more equitable distribution of carrion throughout winter and early spring, said Chris Wilmers in the on-line journal Public Library of Science Biology. He added that scavengers that once relied on winter-killed elk for food now depend on wolf-killed elk. That benefits ravens, eagles, magpies, coyotes and bears (grizzly and black), especially as the bears emerge hungry from hibernation.

"I call it food for the masses," said Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He said he was genuinely surprised by the vast web of life that is linked to wolf kills. "Beetles, wolverine, lynx and more," he said. "It turns out that the Indian legends of ravens following wolves are true-they do follow them because wolves mean food."

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On a quiet spring morning, a resounding "Slap!" reverberates through the air above a remote stream leading to Lake Yellowstone. Over much of the past century, it has been a rarely heard noise in the soundscape that is Yellowstone National Park, but today is growing more common-the sound of a beaver slapping its tail on the water as a warning to other beavers.

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Gopher Tortoise.

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Entire ecosystems would disappear without these 8 endangered species. 

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Entire ecosystems would disappear without these 8 endangered species. 

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Bees.

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Ivory Tree Coral.

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Sea Otter.

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Mangrove- Dwelling Crab.

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Prairie Dogs.

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Tiger Sharks.

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Sugar Maple Tree.

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Mass extinction means three out of every four species you are familiar with would disappear off the face of the Earth, plausibly in time for your grand kids to see it happen, if not before.

You may have heard that biologists now agree that's exactly where we're heading. They're calling it the Sixth Mass Extinction, since it would be only the sixth time in half a billion years -- the entire time complex life has been on the planet -- that so many species go extinct so fast. And you've probably heard that it's us, Homo sapiens, who are causing it, by all the ways we are changing the planet.

But, with all the gloomy predictions being thrown about, you may not know that the Sixth Mass Extinction is not a done deal.

Yes, it's true that about a third of species we've evaluated are threatened with extinction, and that we've killed about half of all our wildlife in the past forty years. But it's also true that so far we've only lost less than one percent of the species that have ridden the planet with us for the last twelve thousand years. That doesn't mean species aren't in trouble -- more than 20,000 of them are -- but it does mean that most of what we want to save is still out there to be saved.

Biologists have been quite successful at nursing some species back to health. But the task of saving the thousands that are are now in dire straits requires more than case-by-case efforts. It requires dealing with the most important underlying drivers of extinction:

human-caused climate change that exceeds the pace and magnitude of change most species have seen in their evolutionary history;

growing enough food to feed seven billion people now and three billion more by mid-century without converting tropical forests to farms;

and our trend of entirely killing off species to make a short-term profit, rather than banking them for perpetual wealth.

Dealing with these ultimate extinction drivers is where your individual actions come in -- multiplied by seven billion, the positive actions accumulate to solve the problem, just as negative actions have accumulated to cause it. So if you want to avoid the Sixth Mass Extinction, here are the top 10 things you can do.

1. Spread the word, to your family, friends, co-workers, and social media circle: the extinction crisis is real. Mobilizing a critical mass of people is the first step. Once humans realize problems are urgent -- even big problems -- we tend to be very good at fixing them.

2. Reduce your carbon footprint. Especially in developed countries, reducing the per-capita use of fossil fuels will be essential for holding climate change below lethal thresholds for many species globally. You can assess and figure out ways to lower your carbon footprint by using one of the many on-line carbon footprint calculators (like carbonfootprint.com). Even little changes like adjusting the thermostat; trip-chaining (go from one errand to the next) when you use your car for errands; recycling; and walking or biking instead of driving, when multiplied by hundreds of millions of the world's most prolific consumers, add up to huge results.

3. Buy products from companies committed to using sustainably produced palm oil in their products. Palm oil is an ingredient in many foods, cosmetics, and soaps. But tropical forests, which harbor up to two-thirds of all land species, are rapidly being cut down to make way for palm-oil plantations. Some companies that use palm oil in their products have committed to not using oil that originates from newly deforested landscapes -- these are the companies to buy from. The Union of Concerned Scientists provides a list.

4. Eat fish from only healthy fisheries. Overfishing has wiped out 90 percent of the big fish from the sea and caused near-extinction of many species. An easy way to make sure the fish you buy are from healthy stocks is to use the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch App, which you can find at here.

5. Eat less meat. If lands now used to grow crops for livestock were instead used to grow crops eaten directly by people, there would be 50 to 70 percent more calories available for human consumption. Which is enough to feed more than a billion more people than we're feeding today, and would prevent plowing over rainforests to make more farms.

6. Never, ever buy anything made from ivory -- or from any other product derived from threatened species. Buying ivory curios supports international terrorist groups and drug lords that orchestrate poaching so severe that, if it keeps up, will have killed all wild elephants on Earth within just twenty more years. Many other species are under siege for use in traditional "medicines" that studies have shown to have no health value, like those using parts of rhinoceros, tigers, snow leopards, and pangolins. When in doubt about whether something you want to buy comes from an endangered species, you can check cites.org, a website that lists of all species that are so endangered their trade has been banned by international law.

7. Enjoy nature. Spend your weekend or vacation exploring a national or state park or similarly biodiversity-rich place. That will remind you why preventing the Sixth Mass Extinction is so important. The reasons people have for wanting to keep species alive are diverse, ranging from "ecosystem services" -- like pollinating crops, keeping soils fertile, or fueling local economies -- to moral imperatives. But one of the most compelling reasons is that places with lots of species simply make people happy when they visit them. This is not surprising from a biological perspective -- the human species evolved with a multitude of other species around us, and on a deep genetic level, biodiversity is home. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson even gave our deep connection to nature a name: biophilia.

8. Adopt a species or become a citizen scientist. Get involved in helping conservation organizations by helping to nurture your favorite threatened species back to health or discovering where species live. Google "Adopt A Species" and you'll get a long list of organizations, species, and helpful actions to choose from. Become a citizen scientist here.

9. Vote for and support leaders who recognize the importance of switching from a fossil-fuel energy system to a carbon-neutral one, who see the necessity of growing crops more efficiently, whose economic agenda includes valuing nature, and who promote women's rights to education and healthcare. Providing access to education for women, especially in poor parts of the world where it is presently lacking, is important with respect to the extinction crisis, because education tends to reduce birth rates -- a reduction that is needed to keep global population below ten billion by mid-century, and humanity's global footprint small enough to give other species a chance.

10. Don't give up. This is not a problem that will be solved overnight. It has taken decades, even centuries, to bring us to the crisis point we're now at. It will also take decades to bring the thousands of threatened species back to health. If you quit too soon, you, and the species you care about, lose. But it's important to start acting now. So many species are at risk that if we don't start turning things around pretty much today, it will be game over before we know it.
Anthony D. Barnosky is a Professor in the Department of Integative Biology, Curator in the Museum of Paleontology, and Research Paleoecologist in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. His new book Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth (University of California Press, Fall 2014) explains how we can avoid the Sixth Mass Extinction.

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10 Ways You Can Help Stop The Sixth Mass Extinction

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Mass extinction means three out of every four species you are familiar with would disappear off the face of the Earth, plausibly in time for your grand kids to see it happen, if not before. You may have heard that biologists now agree that's exactly where we're heading.

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Hand-pollinating crops, growing meat in labs and dealing with the stench of scavenging fungus – this is the future we face

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Hand-pollinating crops, growing meat in labs and dealing with the stench of scavenging fungus – this is the future we face

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A couple of years ago we heard news that 50% of all vertebrate species had disappeared in 40 years. On Thursday, we were greeted with news that by 2020 the figure is likely to rise to 66% of all vertebrates. It is no wonder that the conservationists are shouting. It is no wonder that they are so desperate to get their message heard. Animals, it seems, are on the way out. And no one appears to much care.

So, allow me to entertain the idea of a post-animal Britain. Could we make the best of this world, in true Theresa May fashion? Are animals, perhaps, all a bit overrated? Maybe it wouldn't be so bad?

Sure, there would be some tough choices at first. One particularly pressing matter would be finding a way to cross-pollinate flowering crops. As is well known, trees and insects co-evolved, the plants offering a sugary reward to insects in return for their pollination services. How might we achieve this without bees and flies? Simple. The problem of cross-fertilisation could quite simply be solved by robots or people on day release from jail (or even children who don't get into grammar schools). They could be made to hand-fertilise flowers. They could be like little unthinking bees.

Indeed, hand-fertilisation is already common practice in some parts of the world, where invertebrate populations have already been ravaged. Think of the savings of such a plan! Robots don't need sugary water produced by plants, after all. They run on cheap oil and gas, which there's plenty of, forever. Without invertebrates, everyone wins, right?

More seriously, there could be other benefits. Think of climate change. Global emissions of CO ₂ would be greatly reduced without them, seeing that the gas that sprouts forth from farm animals accounts for 15% of human-caused global CO₂ emissions. So that would be good. We won't even miss the farm animals either, since it seems increasingly likely that we will be 3D printing our dinners in the future. Indeed, lab-grown meat is already becoming a very real prospect, which means that sheep and pigs and chickens, all very costly to run, could disappear quite happily.

And pets, too. Pets can go. They contribute to global emissions as well. If we were to get rid of them, within two generations the very notion of having a pet would probably end up being absurd. The very idea that some houses had cats that would warm a person's lap while they watched Netflix could seem almost perverted to our great-great-grandchildren whose idea of having a meaningful relationship with an animal would, by then, involve tossing 35 Pokéballs at an imaginary one while sitting on the toilet.

It's not all rosy, however. I'm the first to admit that there would be problems in a post-animal world. Sure, green algal blooms would cover the entire face of the planet - most of the land and sea - and all plants would remain uncropped and there would be the stench of scavenging fungus which would come to fill the niche left by Earth's animal decomposers. But we can handle a bit of a whiff or maybe get a man in to fix this for us or something. Oh, and the crops wouldn't grow because there would be no worms to oxygenate the soil. And the soil communities - tiny nematode worms and mites - would die so the soil would essentially be dead and likely to blow away, being completely unsuitable for any forms of crops. But ... let's not get bogged down in the details, OK? Again, children and robots can probably fill this role. It'll be fine.

For there is another bonus to living in a world without animals. It is simple. Imagine the ego-boost that would come from being the only animals to survive a mass extinction event. Imagine being the pinch point. You and me. We could be the masters of a mass extinction so enormous that all future life on Earth might be a descendent of us. Imagine, in 50m years, little rat humans and little pig humans and little humans that feast upon wetland grasses poisoned by a film of toxic bacteria. Imagine little fungus-eating humans, gorging upon the silent forests of stinking colourless mushrooms that thrive on rotting, uneaten trees. Imagine little cat humans that can warm your lap while watching Netflix. That sounds great, doesn't it? We could be surrounded by animals shaped in our own image. We could be gods, essentially.

It may sound surreal, but conservationists, I believe, imagine this world quite a bit. They consider this human world, and what it would be like without animals in it. A silent world where it's all about us and what industry can do - where there's no escape from humanity. A world where the only sounds are human-made and the only colours are factory-made is not an Earthly place, to me at least.

So perhaps it's time, finally, that we started considering the worst if only for a few moments every now and then. Perhaps it will make us listen that bit harder the next time statistics like these are published by conservationists. Because this is a real decline. This is a real trend. This is what mass extinctions look like from the inside. An animal world becoming less animal by the day. So, which world do you like best: ours or theirs?
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Imagine a world without animals. You'll soon see how much we need them | Jules Howard

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A couple of years ago we heard news that 50% of all vertebrate species had disappeared in 40 years. On Thursday, we were greeted with news that by 2020 the figure is likely to rise to 66% of all vertebrates. It is no wonder that the conservationists are shouting.

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How Long Can You Survive If All The Plants In The World Die?

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Michael Jackson - Earth Song (Official Video)

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His Epic Message Will Make You Want to Save the World | Short Film Showcase