Last week I wrote about an important new study showing that three very different groups of species–plants, butterflies, and birds–have all been declining at the same alarming rate for over 40 years in Great Britain. The authors concluded that if the pattern is global, it may mean that we are entering one of the biggest bouts of mass extinctions in the past 500 million years.

The media handled the story pretty well, although some reports got ahead of the science. Here’s a story that may give you the impression that the study documented the extinction of entire species, for example. The researchers only recorded the extinction of a few species in Britain, which can still be found elsewhere. But many