Thursday, March 28, 2024

Many Land Animals ‘Will Go Extinct’ In Just Two Decades

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The northern white rhinoceros. The passenger pigeon. The Javan tiger. The golden toad. The Pinta Island tortoise.

These are just some of the dozens of land-based vertebrate species that have gone extinct over the past century. Many more will likely follow them into oblivion soon, a team of scientists warns in a new study, which makes for sobering reading.

“The ongoing sixth mass extinction may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization, because it is irreversible,” the biologists write. “Thousands of populations of critically endangered vertebrate animal species have been lost in a century, indicating that the sixth mass extinction is human caused and accelerating.”

The mass extinction of land animals, long underway, is picking up speed, the experts stress. The main reasons are unchecked human population growth and the unstoppable exploitation of the scarce natural resources left on the planet. Habitat destruction, the international wildlife trade, wanton pollution and climate change are posing further existential threats to a whole host of critically endangered animals.

Based on the researchers’ estimates, in the the last century at least 543 land vertebrate species went extinct. Read more…

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