The Science of Extinction
25 September - 15 mins
Podcast Series
Show Me the Science with Luke O'Neill
Earth has always been a planet of comebacks. Life has thrived, collapsed, and reinvented itself in astonishing ways. Scientists call the five great wipe-outs of the past the “Big Five” – huge mass extinctions that reset the clock on life. Without them, we wouldn’t even be here to talk about it.
This week, Luke O’Neill dives into what these extinction events can teach us - from the ancient Ordovician seas that suddenly emptied, to the Triassic era where one wave of destruction cleared the stage for the dinosaurs, and the dramatic end of the Cretaceous, when an asteroid put an end to their reign. The most catastrophic of all came at the end of the Permian, nicknamed “the Great Dying,” when n...
Series Episodes
