Los finales del mundo

Although it may not seem like it, our Earth has already gone extinct five times: it has been roasted, frozen, poisoned, suffocated and stoned by asteroids. Science suggests that climate change played a crucial role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history. Peter Brannen embarks on an intrepid journey through the planet's five mass extinctions to explore what those dead ends of his past have been like while also offering us a glimpse of our future, an increasingly dangerous future. The hypothesis with which the researchers work is that the climatic changes of the 21st century show patterns analogous to those of these five extinctions. Tracing the visible clues these devastations have left in the fossil record, we uncover crime scenes - from South Africa to the New York Palisades - that give us clues to the history of each extinction. In a playful style, the author approaches these clues in the form of the fossil record (riddled with creatures like seagull-sized dragonflies and guillotine-mouthed fish), and the scientists who investigate them with forensic tools of modern science reconstructs what really happened at those crime scenes left behind on Earth by past extinctions.