Jul 31, 2018 12:28 AM EDT
Do bacteria ever go extinct? New research says yes, bigtime
Bacteria go extinct at substantial rates, although appear to avoid the mass extinctions that have hit larger forms of life on Earth, according to new research from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Caltech, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The finding, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, contradicts widely held scientific thinking that microbe taxa, because of their very large populations, rarely die off.