A new study suggests something counterintuitive: the rate at which species are vanishing may have actually peaked around a century ago and declined since. Kristen Saban and John Wiens of the University of Arizona analyzed 912 documented extinctions across plants and animals over the past 500 years, drawing on data from nearly two million assessed species. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show extinctions rose sharply through the 1800s and early 1900s before leveling off. For vertebrates, arthropods, and plants, losses have generally slowed over the past century.
But here's the catch: this apparent reprieve probably tells us more about where and how we look than about nature's actual state. Most recorded extinctions happened on islands, where invasive rats, pigs, and goats systematically destroyed native species. Today's biggest threats—deforestation, pollution, climate change—are concentrated on continents, where species loss is far harder to spot. A frog disappearing into the Amazon is harder to document than a bird vanishing from a small island.
"The fact that we're not seeing as many extinctions as we thought doesn't mean that biodiversity is doing well," Saban said. "It just means we're not detecting them as well."
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Start Your News DetoxWiens added that the study almost certainly underestimates the true toll. "The extinction crisis is still very much ongoing," he said. "We're just not seeing the full extent of it yet."
This distinction matters. The slowdown in recorded extinctions doesn't mean populations are recovering or that habitat loss has stopped. It means our detection methods haven't caught up to the scale of the problem. A species can lose 99% of its population and still technically exist. Entire ecosystems can collapse without triggering a single "extinction" in the scientific record.
The researchers were explicit that their data should not be read as reassurance. Instead, they're pointing to a blind spot in how we measure biodiversity loss—and arguing that we need far more sophisticated monitoring to understand what's actually happening to life on Earth. The real work, they suggest, is just beginning.
