While scientists agree on the dire state of life on Earth, they don't always agree on how we should describe it.
scientists studied museum collections, records and expert accounts of 200 known species of land snails.
"There's a signal there for a very large loss that isn't representative of the current data," says Dr Alexander Lees, an ornithologist at Manchester Metropolitan University who was not involved in the study. They then compare that background rate with modern rates of extinction gathered from records to see how the two line up.
Others are more conservative, saying that we just don't know how long it will take for species to actually go extinct. Prof Pincelli Hull, a palaeontologist at Yale University, says it won't take a mass extinction event for humans to feel the bite of our impact on nature, so we shouldn't use that as a benchmark for a need to take action.
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