AI model says Earth's 5 mass extinctions never happened

A scientist in China used an AI model trained on fossil data to state that most of Earth's mass extinctions never happened, or at least did not occur in the manner we perceive them. The research was carried out by Shuzhong Shen at Nanjing University in China and presented at the Geological Society of America’s meeting in Denver.

"The canonical 'Big Five' mass extinctions have long been regarded as the principal drivers of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity history. This paradigm, however, was built upon taxonomic range compilations and stage-level time bins that cannot resolve ecological dynamics operating on timescales of thousands to tens of thousands of years," the study authors wrote in the paper.

OneStrata "learns a shared probabilistic representation of geological time directly from fragmented stratigraphic observations." This is similar to how large language model trains on texts. The team used a huge dataset of fossil information called OneStratigraphy for the study. When fossil specimens are categorised, it is done over time spans covering millions of years. This leads to changes happening over shorter periods of time getting lost.

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Studying short time periods

Shen's team wanted to fix this problem and use new technologies to shorten this timespan to just tens of thousands of years. In 2020, he worked with other Chinese scientists to divide Earth's ancient history into intervals of approximately 26,000 years using a supercomputer. This allowed them to examine changes in marine life in much smaller time intervals.

Information was analysed from 11,000 fossils of marine organisms, which showed their species, when they lived, when some of them disappeared and how marine biodiversity changed over time.

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This showed that the Late Devonian mass extinction, which happened around 360 million years ago, unfolded gradually over roughly 50 million years. This is a long timespan, especially compared to the End-Permian mass extinction, which took place over 63,000 years. The researchers also found that the end‑Triassic and end‑Cretaceous extinctions occurred over millions of years.

Since mass extinctions unfold gradually over a long period of time, scientists believe we are in the midst of the sixth one. The main reason for this is climate change, which could end or change life over thousands of years.