What we did

We came up with a few article ideas that might appeal to the readers of Scientific American magazine. The SA team liked our mass extinction idea. There have been five great mass extinction events identified in the 3.8 billion year history of life on our planet. What is the cause of each of these mass extinction events that eliminates 50-90% of species? It tends to be human nature to expect, and look for, one “smoking gun” to be the cause of each event. This is often not the case. Many of these events have multiple causes that occurred at the same time. The idea that multiple catastrophic events could occur at the exact same time may seem like a case of extreme bad luck. It may be difficult to believe that this extreme bad luck could occur once let alone multiple times throughout history. It’s difficult to understand how this could ever happen until one realizes that these mass extinction events don’t occur overnight. Each mass extinction event took thousands to millions of years to complete. Given this long duration, it’s really not that surprising that multiple bad things could happen at the same time, having an additive effect. Multiple detrimental events would result in compounding the struggles individual species must face in order to survive in their local environments.

The concept development, literature review, and graphic work were all done by Science Lab Studios. Here are a few sketches that led to the final published article.