[Read by Sean Runnette] While examining the history of our planet and actively exploring our present environment, science journalist Michael Tennesen describes what life on earth could look like after the next mass extinction. A growing number of scientists agree we are headed toward a mass extinction, perhaps in as little as three hundred years. There have already been five in the last 600 million years, including the Cretaceous extinction, during which an asteroid knocked out the dinosaurs. Though these events were initially destructive, they were also prime movers of evolutionary change in nature. And we can see some of the warning signs of another extinction event coming as our oceans lose both fish and oxygen. In The Next Species, Michael Tennesen questions what life might be like after it happens.
