Professor Roy Plotnick featured in Science Magazine
Roy Plotnick, paleontologist and professor of Earth and Environmental Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, emphasizes the crucial importance of researching modern day extinctions, as if they were in fossil record already. Paleontologists have researched into Earth and uncovered fossils from the past to existing time. They construct the chronological order of what came before the extinct species. Humans continue to drive species into extinction and almost five hundred vertebrate species have gone extinct in the past one hundred years; however, other consequences include scientists not being able to find those fossils from past species, due to a small- proportion of the caused extinctions will actually leave a fossil trace.The most threatened species are the ones least likely to be preserved for posterity. Read more about what Professor Plotnick had to say here.