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# Three of Earth's Sudden Extinctions May Have Taken Millions of Years
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/three-of-earths-sudden-extinctions-may-have-taken-millions-of-years/
- Published: 2026-11-12T11:03:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-12T11:03:00.000Z
- Description: Rocks kept time in million-year chunks. Sharpened to the nearest thousand years, some of life's most famous catastrophes start to look like long goodbyes.
- Author: Groundwater
- Tags: Earth Sciences

The day the dinosaurs died may not have been a day. A reconstruction of the fossil record suggests that the end-Cretaceous extinction, along with the Late Devonian and end-Triassic, drained Earth's biodiversity across millions of years.

Those three belong to the "big five," the mass extinctions that textbooks treat as the hinge points of life's story. The picture comes from OneStrata, an AI model built by Nanjing University paleontologist Shuzhong Shen and colleagues. It works much like a chatbot guessing what word comes next, except it learned from almost 4 million fossils instead of words.

Fossils sit at different depths in stacked sedimentary rock, and depth tracks time. Stitching together sites scattered across the globe is so hard that researchers usually lump fossils into bins spanning millions of years, which smears out anything faster.

Shen's team spent two decades building the database behind the model. A 2020 supercomputer run sharpened the timeline to about 26,000 years. OneStrata reportedly gets it down to about 1,000\. Shen presented the work at a Geological Society of America meeting in Denver on Oct. 12.

The mystery is what those slow declines actually mean. Shen cautions that the model tracks overall biodiversity, so species could have been vanishing quickly while newcomers took their places. Other researchers are less dazzled, noting that detailed local records of past extinctions already exist. University of California, Santa Cruz, paleontologist Matthew Clapham said the model might allow some extra analyses but doubted it would upend the field.

The asteroid still hit the Yucatán. The rock layers are asking how long the ending took.

**Read the full story at** [Nature, October 20, 2026](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03316-4?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Taking attendance once every few million years makes every absence look like a sudden mass dropout. Some of those students were sneaking out all semester.