We may not be living through Earth’s sixth mass extinction event — at least not yet.
That’s the conclusion of a new analysis of plant and animal extinctions published September 4 in PLOS Biology. The researchers propose that human-driven extinctions of genera in recent centuries have been rare.
But not everyone agrees with that assessment. The study is more about semantics, says Gerardo Ceballos, an ecologist who coauthored a 2023 study arguing that Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction. “The people who define a mass extinction are the ones who are studying it,” says Ceballos, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.