It’s a mystery on a global scale: five times in Earth’s past, life has been nearly extinguished, the vast majority of plants and animals annihilated in a geologic instant. What triggered these dramatic events? And what might they tell us about the fate of our world today?
Airing on Smithsonian at 9pm on May 29th, Mass Extinction: Life at the Brink, narrated by Tony® and Emmy Award®-winning actor Jeffrey Wright, joins scientists around the globe in search of answers to two of the most dramatic mass extinctions: the ‘K/T Extinction’, which wiped out the dinosaurs, and ‘The Great Dying’, which 250 million years ago annihilated nearly 90% of all Earth’s species. These early mass extinctions could hold clues for what may be happening today.
