to be fair, most species in history never made it into the fossil record. it takes pretty special circumstances to make fossils. don't take this as me saying our extinction crisis is not real, just that i see a headline like that and say "well duh. tbh it's possible that WE as 21st century humans won't end up in the fossil record. And we purposely bury our dead."
That's actually kind of the tack the article takes: "most of the shit that's extinct never made a fossil, so the fossils we have don't represent most of the shit." it does finish with "so should we still worry about extinction?" to which the answer is "hell to the yes." To your point, the article doesn't quite support the article.
which I also agree with. it's... not a great article. I feel like whomever wrote it got to the end and was like "I feel like I contradict myself here. welp, I spent a bunch of time writing this so I'm going to post it anyways.""so should we still worry about extinction?" to which the answer is "hell to the yes."
insomniasexx add this comment to your list of KB "yo-isms"
no idea. but as I said, fossilization takes very specific circumstances. Entire species of animals have existed and died out without any trace in the fossil record - we only have an inkling that they may have existed because of gaps in the fossil record that could potentially be filled.
I'm fascinated by loss of human knowledge over time -- one of the many reasons I enjoyed Anathem so much -- so I do wonder if there will ever come a time when later humans dig up our fossils and gradually piece together that we existed on every continent.
This fascinates me as well! I even see it in music all the time. Like, there are so many things that i dig up that I wind up finding out i'm "rediscovering" because bassists are bad record keepers.