Five centuries, stacked.
Forty documented extinctions between 1500 and today, binned by decade and stacked by taxon. The curve grows monotonically, the colour band tells which group is losing what. Five anchor points mark species the chart needs no labels for.
Five centuries, stacked.
The cumulative count of documented extinctions since 1500, binned by decade and coloured by taxon. The curve grows monotonically — every decade either holds steady or climbs. Wave animation re-runs each time you scroll back in.
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The curve
The line counts only species where last-sighting or extinction year is documented well enough to land on a decade. Many more species disappeared without record. The visible curve is the lower bound of a much larger loss.
The colours
Six taxa share the chart: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and insects. Mammals and birds dominate the count because Western naturalists watched and named them earlier and more carefully than any other group.
The animation
Each bar grows from the baseline when the chart enters the viewport, in a left-to-right wave across the centuries. Scroll away and back and the wave runs again. The eye reads time as motion.
The bias
Almost every named species here lived on an island, a continent reached by European trade routes, or a place where naturalists kept journals. This is a chart of human attention as much as of biodiversity loss.
A thousand times faster than before us.
Background extinction — the slow churn of species disappearing without human influence — runs at roughly one species per million per year. Recent vertebrate losses run at about a thousand times that rate. The dot grid below is the comparison at scale: one green dot on top, one thousand orange dots underneath.
Background rate
Roughly one extinction per million species per year, averaged across millions of years of fossil record.
Today
Recent vertebrate losses are about a thousand times the background rate. Each orange dot is one unit of rate.
The 1000× figure comes from Ceballos et al. 2015 (PNAS, "Accelerated modern human-induced species losses"), using a conservative comparison of recent vertebrate extinctions to the geological background rate. Other studies cite 100× to 1000× depending on which taxa and which time window.
What the Red List says today.
Five vertebrate classes, every assessed species in each one stacked by IUCN Red List status. Column width is proportional to how many species the class contains, vertical stack shows the share at each threat level. Amphibians stand out — the green-grass slice at the bottom is much thinner than for the others.
- Least Concern
- Near Threatened
- Vulnerable
- Endangered
- Critically Endangered
- Extinct
Hover any block to isolate that status, or any column to isolate that class. Numbers below each column are total assessed species in the class (IUCN Red List 2024 Summary Statistics). Percentages rounded for visual clarity.
Most losses happened on islands.
The 40 documented species from chart one, regrouped by where they lived. Islands sit at the top, continents at the bottom. Each dot is one species, coloured by taxon. Mauritius alone holds more entries than several entire continents — small isolated populations are uniquely vulnerable.
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Hover any dot to see species, region and year. The 40 species are the same set as in chart one — same data, different cut. Region classification follows the standard biogeographic split. Reveal cascades dot by dot when you scroll the section into view.
One curve looks back. Two charts measure the speed. One map shows the geography of loss.
Data: IUCN Red List Summary Statistics 2024, Wikipedia (curated list of recently extinct species), Ceballos et al. 2015 (PNAS) for background rate · 40 documented species + 5 vertebrate classes · All four charts multi-trigger on viewport re-entry