What even is this? A bunch of unrelated researchers making vastly different claims from one another awkwardly lumped together. I don’t know of any paleontologist that thinks that a mass extinction event is just “one really bad day where everything dies” which seems to be the definition the author of this article is using, it’s well known that it is a sudden event (geologically speaking, which can still be across millions of years) that causes a collapse in biodiversity and food webs and the extinction of individual species and genera as a result. This article seems to be implying that because entire branches of life didn’t just suddenly all die out overnight, extinction events never happened. Especially damning that they give a definition of the term at the end of the article which, if it were at the beginning, would prove almost every one of their points wrong.
I don’t want to say that this was written by AI, it’s easy to jump at shadows, but the way it just kind of seems to forget the topic at hand and rambles without saying much really does at the very least feel like “I need to hit that word count” type of writing.
Looking at this pop-science author’s catalogue, I see a lot of disparate subjects, he seems to trained in Geology and Paleobiology, but this article reads like it was written by an amateur. It doesn’t help that most of his other articles written (and many of his books) seem completely unrelated to his specialisation.
What’s the point in being a science communicator if you fail to actually explain the underlying science that you’re talking about, and how your writing will be received by the public?
The same way Canada compares itself to America favourably, New Zealand compares themselves to Australia. Of course, this means that they are absolute dogshit when it comes to actually caring about indigenous rights, but they aren’t as bad as [literally the worst examples of settler colonialism] which means they are above reproach and immune to criticism.