Hardly a day goes by where there isn't a media report of a species under threat of extinction or, in fact, going extinct.
Planet Earth has been here before - we can find the traces of mass extinction events in the fossil record, where up to 96 percent of living species were wiped out in the ancient past.
So how does the extinction we're seeing now compare with those extinction events throughout history?
Dr Michael Hannah is an adjunct professor of Geography at Victoria University of Wellington and author of the book Extinctions: Living and Dying in the Margin of Error and he speaks to Emile Donovan.
Photo: ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
