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comment by coffeesp00ns
coffeesp00ns  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Most species that disappear today will leave no trace in the fossil record

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."





kleinbl00  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

coffeesp00ns  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    "so should we still worry about extinction?" to which the answer is "hell to the yes."

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."

kleinbl00  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

"Ten bucks per cpm, yo!"

thenewgreen  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

insomniasexx add this comment to your list of KB "yo-isms"

user-inactivated  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    tbh it's possible that WE as 21st century humans won't end up in the fossil record

Has there ever been a mammal of comparable size/number of bones to us that reached a world population of 7.5 billion?

coffeesp00ns  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

user-inactivated  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

wasoxygen  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The scurvy story was fascinating.

user-inactivated  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  
user-inactivated  ·  2931 days ago  ·  link  ·  

What a fucking appalling wikipedia article.

coffeesp00ns  ·  2932 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.