Congratulations, you're part of the 1 percent. That is, the 1 percent of species on Earth not yet extinct: For the last 3.5 billion or so years, about 99 percent of the estimated 4 billion species that ever evolved are no longer around.Many evolutionary family trees got the ax, so to speak, during a mass extinction. These events are defined as the loss of least 75 percent of species in the geological blink of an eye — which can range from thousands to millions of years. Researchers have enough data from the fossil record going back just over half a billion years to identify five such mass extinction events, and many scientists believe we're in the middle of a sixth.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/mass-extinctions

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