Parsing the taxonomy of extinct animals is a notoriously tricky business, leading to debates about whether certain species should be lumped together or split apart.
The actual numbers of species lost in previous environmental catastrophes are probably always worse than we currently record because we're probably lumping more than one species under one name.
Some paleontologists argue that our estimates of prehistoric biodiversity are so far off base that they risk skewing our understanding of how life on Earth is faring today.
In the past two years, multiple studies have sought to clarify whether the animal known as Tyrannosaurus rex represents a single species.
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