Are We Living Through a 6th Mass Extinction?

Dr. Pia Viglietti is a research scientist at the Field Museum of Natural History, and she studies one of the most devastating extinction events Earth has ever seen. We go straight into the sixth mass extinction, why it’s human-driven, and what the Permian event can teach us about what happens when carbon dioxide runs wild.

But this isn’t just doom and numbers. Pia takes us into the Karoo Basin in South Africa, where the land record is so well-preserved it reads like a warning label for modern life. We talk about the animals that survived, why Lystrosaurus became the “poster child” of extinction recovery, how scientists debate boundaries in the rock record, and what it actually feels like to find something that hasn’t seen daylight in millions of years.

If you care about climate, evolution, biodiversity, paleontology, or the future of life on Earth, this conversation is going to stick with you.