I cannot read your link (the url is incomplete) and I cannot read the OP's link (site overloaded perhaps) but when we discover 18000 new species of life that do

I cannot read your link (the url is incomplete) and I cannot read the OP's link (site overloaded perhaps) but when we discover 18000 new species of life that does not mean that they did not exist before we discovered them. My best guess is that there are several species that we already did know about that have gone extinct. Here's a depressing wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_extinctions_in_the_Holocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_extinctions_in_the... It's possible that there are species that have gone extinct as a result of human activity that we never even knew existed. So scientists make approximations to the extent of the damage we are causing. Because of the decline in the populations of species we are aware of, it seems like we will be adding many more species to that wikipedia page soon. Here is a link to a CNN story with a similar headline for those of you unable to see the OP's story like me: http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/11/world/sutter-mass-extinction-ceballos-study/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/11/world/sutter-mass-extinction-c...