When did the sixth mass extinction happen?
Recommended for Middle Grades
Ages layered thick like ash. Bones like brittle prayers in the rock, a world turned tomb 550 million years gone. They murmur, the pale scholars, of an “Ordovician Extinction,” a line drawn across the scroll of time. They murmur of stolen breath, a world choking in the grip of a dying sun. All beginnings bear the seeds of their own end.
The Dirge of Ages
Eons whisper, winds grow cold,
A tapestry, of life grown old. Skeletal forms in dust do lie,
Beneath a pale and fading sky.
Extinction’s mark, a mournful sigh.
What is this “extinction,” then? Not a cataclysm, but a slow bleed. Species fading like stars at dawn, their cries lost in the vast, indifferent echo of the world.
A Tally of the Dead
Once, 550 million years past, they say the ancient oceans teemed with life Ediacaran. A tapestry woven, then rent. Now, eighty percent lie unraveled, turned to brittle echoes in the stone. A recent study, a finger tracing the scar across time, marks the world’s first gasp, the first long sigh toward silence.
An Ode to Oblivion
Hearken now, to the tale I weave,
Of lives lost ‘neath the ancient seas.
Countless forms, in ages past,
Flickered brief, then breathed their last.
Ediacaran, their kingdom wide,
Now dust and bone where they did hide.
Of species born in vibrant throng,
But a meager few now linger long.
Forms honed thin by fading breath,
Scraped by upon the edge of death.
Extinction is the hand of change, clenching and unclenching. Each death-rattle brings shifts in the turning of the cosmos. The scientists with their lists, their fossils cold as coins, tell tales of Ediacaran creatures fading even as the rock set around them.
Of 70 species, only 14 scraped a meager existence beyond the precipice. And all, each survivor, bore the mark of scarcity – bodies paper-thin, flayed wide and flat in supplication to a dwindling world.
So it seems the Ediacaran died not in flame, but in a whispered exhalation. Gasping for oxygen in oceans turned to graveyard soup. Another ledger entry for the tallyman of eternity. “Lessons in ruin,” the lead researcher says, his voice a rasp, a wind through dead trees.
Watch a video
“SciShow” on YouTube looks back at the five mass extinctions.
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