The Big Five Mass Extinctions

c. 538.8 Ma – ongoing44 items

deep timeextinction
Stevns Klint, Denmark: chalk cliffs crossed by the thin Fish Clay that marks the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, where the Alvarezes found iridium. Photo: kallerna. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Stevns Klint, Denmark: chalk cliffs crossed by the thin Fish Clay that marks the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, where the Alvarezes found iridium. Photo: kallerna. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five times life nearly ended, and the argument over a sixth

Five times in the last 450 million years, most species on Earth died in what was, geologically, an instant. Ice, suffocating seas, continent-sized lava fields and an asteroid each played a part. This timeline runs from the Ordovician to the Cretaceous and on to today, when scientists argue over whether a sixth has begun.

How to read it

  • Eras and periods run as bands, so you can see what each extinction ended: four of the five close a period, and two of them close an era.

  • Each extinction is drawn as a period where its pulses had a length, with its likely trigger (glaciers or lava) as an overlapping band. The end-Cretaceous is an event: an impact takes an afternoon.

  • The discoverers crowd in at the far right, from Cuvier in 1796 to the Alvarezes and the Chicxulub crater, then the sixth-extinction debate. Zoom in to see them.

Threads to follow

  • big five — the five extinctions themselves

  • volcanoes — Siberia, the Central Atlantic, the Deccan

  • climate — ice, heat and suffocating oceans

  • asteroids — Chicxulub and the hunt for its crater

  • science — how we learned any of this

  • humans — from the mammoths to the dodo and today

  • controversy — causes and counts still argued over

Loss figures differ a lot between studies, so they are given as ranges with the study named. The species and genus figures for each of the five come from the table in Barnosky et al. (2011). The three-quarters threshold for a mass extinction goes back to David Jablonski (1994).

Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540 million years or so. — Anthony Barnosky and colleagues, Nature, 2011

Dates are years before present. Period boundaries follow the International Chronostratigraphic Chart (v2026/06), with its uncertainties; the extinctions use high-precision uranium–lead and argon dates where they exist. Cuvier’s 1796 lecture is dated in the French Republican calendar he lived under: year IV.

Items

  1. Paleozoic

    ≈ 287 million years

  2. Cambrian

    ≈ 52 million years

  3. Ordovician

    ≈ 43.8 million years

  4. Late Ordovician mass extinction

    ≈ 2.1 million years · Dob’s Linn, near Moffat, southern Scotland

  5. First pulse: the ice builds

  6. Silurian

    ≈ 23.5 million years

  7. Second pulse: the ice melts

  8. Devonian

    ≈ 60.8 million years

  9. Late Devonian extinction: the Kellwasser crisis

    ≈ 850 thousand years · Coumiac quarry, near Cessenon-sur-Orb, Montagne Noire

  10. Hangenberg crisis

    ≈ 340 thousand years · Hangenberg Shale sections, northern Sauerland

  11. Carboniferous

    ≈ 60 million years

  12. Permian

    ≈ 47 million years

  13. Capitanian crisis

    Mount Emei, Sichuan

  14. Siberian Traps

    ≈ 800 thousand years · Putorana Plateau, Siberian Traps

  15. End-Permian extinction: the Great Dying

    ≈ 61 thousand years · Meishan section D, Changxing, Zhejiang

  16. Mesozoic

    ≈ 186 million years

  17. Triassic

    ≈ 50.5 million years

  18. Early Triassic hothouse

    ≈ 4.9 million years

  19. Central Atlantic Magmatic Province

    ≈ 600 thousand years · The Palisades, Hudson River, New Jersey

  20. End-Triassic extinction

    ≈ 200 thousand years · Kuhjoch, Karwendel Mountains, Tyrol

  21. Jurassic

    ≈ 58.3 million years

  22. The first lavas and the main pulse

  23. Cretaceous

    ≈ 77.1 million years

  24. Deccan Traps

    ≈ 800 thousand years · Deccan Traps, western India

  25. Cenozoic

  26. Paleogene

    ≈ 43 million years

  27. Chicxulub impact

    Chicxulub crater, Yucatán

  28. End-Cretaceous extinction

    K–Pg boundary section near El Kef, Tunisia

  29. Neogene

    ≈ 20.5 million years

  30. Quaternary

  31. Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions

    ≈ 40 thousand years

  32. The last dodos

    Mauritius

  33. Cuvier proves extinction

    Louvre, Paris

  34. Phillips’s first diversity curve

  35. Iridium in the Gubbio clay

    Bottaccione Gorge, Gubbio

  36. Raup and Sepkoski name the Big Five

  37. The crater is found

  38. “The Sixth Extinction”

  39. Has the sixth already arrived?

  40. Kolbert’s Pulitzer

  41. Vertebrates vanishing up to 100 times faster

  42. A million species at risk

    UNESCO headquarters, Paris

  43. Counting the invertebrates

  44. The Anthropocene voted down