An interesting thought experiment here and something many of us have discussed down the pub or over coffee. What will the future rock record look like? Well in this interview Roy Plotnick discusses his cool ideas on the future fossil record. How many species that go extinct due to humans could be discovered as fossils by future scientists. Probably not that many! It is particularly bad if you are small, fuzzy and cute!
When Roy Plotnick thinks about species going extinct, he tries to envision how that might look to a scientist millions of years from now. Plotnick, a palaeontologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has launched an unusual thought experiment to consider whether animals that vanish today might never be represented in the future fossil record. He calls it the 'invisible extinction'.
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