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Years of scientific debate over the extinction of ancient species in North America have led to many theories. There’s one thing all researchers agree on, however: A mass extinction occurred here in a geological instant. And other scientists have discovered that WE almost went extinct 1.2 million years ago. Will it happen again?

When our ancestors were spreading through Africa, Europe and Asia, there were probably only between 18,500 and 26,000 couples producing children. That’s a smaller breeding population than today’s endangered gorillas!
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One in four mammal species is threatened with extinction, and the terrestrial mammals in Southeast Asia are particularly at risk. The top threats to land mammals are habitat loss and harvesting (hunting, use for medicine, fuel and other materials).
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…can warn us about the future – No matter what one of our candidates says about polar bears, the truth is that global warming is rapidly reducing the number of animal species.And it?s not only happening in Alaska?two species of giraffe, several rhinos and five elephant relatives, along with multitudes of rodents, bush pigs, horses, antelope and apes, once inhabited what is now northern Pakistan. Polar bears are disappearing now, but these other extinctions happened 8 million years ago, when the climate shifted dramatically.Since this happened so long ago, why should we care? Paleoecologist Catherine Badgley says, “Climate is going to produce changes in ecological structure of all sorts of plants and animals around the world, now as in the past.read more

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Sharks and whales aren’t the only sea creatures being fished into extinction?the fish that much of the world relies on for food are going extinct as well. Part of the cause may be global warming, but most of it can be blamed on overfishing.

In BBC News, Richard Black writes, “There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a major scientific study.” He quotes researcher Steve Palumbi as saying, “Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood.”

Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
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