One of the most frustrating claims by people raising money promoting an environmental apocalypse has been that species are about to go extinct or diversity will be lost. It leads to rampant distrust in science because advocates know if their side is spinning facts to suit an agenda, the science side might be too.
The reality is that 99.99% of species we have never even known about, and we can only measure diversity in terms of what we can measure. With 27,000 species of bees, and only a handful with hives of any kind, it's bizarre to read that wild bees are at risk, and the situation is even more complex in the oceans.
A new analysis of the fossil record by paleontologists at the University of Connecticut and the Smithsonian Institute demonstrates that the number of animal species in the world's oceans has skyrocketed during the past 200 million years, despite mass extinctions like the one at the end of the Cretaceous Period (66 million years ago).
The history of diversification has been controversial due to concerns about data quality, but these biases were controlled in this analysis of a large Internet database of paleontological data. The analyses demonstrate that modern oceans are uniquely diverse -- never before in the history of the Earth have so many species coexisted. These results provide context for concerns about escalating extinction rates -- humans have been fortunate to live at an exceptional time of unprecedented biodiversity, but human impacts could tip the Earth from a state of increasing biodiversity to one of decline.
Sustained Mesozoic-Cenozoic diversification of marine Metazoa: A consistent signal from the fossil record