For over 3.5 billion years, life on Earth has evolved through a balance of species emergence and extinction. But when extinctions outpace the formation of new species, mass extinction events occur. Earth has experienced five such events since the Cambrian period. Today, driven by human activity (including habitat loss, pollution, and climate change) species are disappearing at rates up to 10,000 times higher than normal, signalling that a sixth mass extinction may already be