Living in a 'mass extinction'
What does it mean to be living through Earth's 6th mass extinction event? How does it feel to be living through one of the most calamitous events in this planet's history? And what are we supposed to do?
What does it mean to be living through Earth's 6th mass extinction event? How does it feel to be living through one of the most calamitous events in this planet's history? And what are we supposed to do?
Environment
2 hours ago
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Ask a 10-year-old to name some extinct animals and they can usually rattle off ancient species such as the Tasmanian Tiger, Woolly Mammoth and Dodo. Some may even be able to tell you what the animals used to look like without ...
Ecology
Jul 9, 2024
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Businesses are keenly aware that consumers value ethical business practices, including the protection of biodiversity, and many have committed to biodiversity conservation. A road block, however, turns out to be the large ...
Ecology
Jul 5, 2024
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France's natural history collections contain nearly 6% of the world's total natural specimens across multiple institutions, and the e-COL+ project aims to capture and reconstruct these specimens in 3D for easy access and ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jul 3, 2024
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The debate has raged for decades: Was it humans or climate change that led to the extinction of many species of large mammals, birds, and reptiles that have disappeared from Earth over the past 50,000 years?
Evolution
Jul 1, 2024
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If you've ever snacked on raisins or enjoyed a glass of wine, you may, in part, have the extinction of the dinosaurs to thank for it. In a discovery described in the journal Nature Plants, researchers found fossil grape seeds ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 1, 2024
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Ammonites were not in decline before their extinction, scientists have found.
Paleontology & Fossils
Jun 27, 2024
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We've all seen the surreal footage in nature documentaries showing hydrothermal vents on the frigid ocean floor—bellowing black plumes of super-hot water—and the life forms that cling to them. Now, a new study by UC Santa ...
Astrobiology
Jun 24, 2024
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Most of us are aware that climate change is altering our world. But it can also make certain natural disasters, like hurricanes, more likely in places where susceptible species reside.
Plants & Animals
Jun 18, 2024
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New research by Swansea University and the University of Zurich has found that sharks retained high levels of functional diversity for most of the last 66 million years, before steadily declining over the last 10 million ...
Ecology
Jun 14, 2024
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In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of a species or group of taxa. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of that species (although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point). Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "re-appears" (typically in the fossil record) after a period of apparent absence.
Through evolution, new species arise through the process of speciation—where new varieties of organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological niche—and species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition. A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance, although some species, called living fossils, survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Extinction, though, is usually a natural phenomenon; it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct.
Prior to the dispersion of humans across the earth, extinction generally occurred at a continuous low rate, mass extinctions being relatively rare events. Starting approximately 100,000 years ago, and coinciding with an increase in the numbers and range of humans, species extinctions have increased to a rate unprecedented since the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event. This is known as the Holocene extinction event and is at least the sixth such extinction event. Some experts have estimated that up to half of presently existing species may become extinct by 2100.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA