Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
Loosing them at a faster rate than anytime in the past 4 billion or so years?
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"The speed at which species are being lost is much faster than any we've seen in the past -- including those [extinctions] related to meteor collisions," said Daniel Simberloff, a University of Tennessee ecologist and prominent expert in biological diversity who participated in the museum's survey. [Note: the last mass extinction caused by a meteor collision was that of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.]
Most of his peers apparently agree. Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a "mass extinction" was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. Nearly all attributed the losses to human activity, especially the destruction of plant and animal habitats.
http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html
That is a page with a few hundred links to articles on plant and animal species extinction. Interesting to skim the article titles.
Some species disappearance is being linked to "warming". In other cases its a habitat issue primarily, something which could not have occurred in the past on the scale humans have now undertaken with modern technology and the ever growing human population. In listening to this darwin series lecture from Cambridge that I found on iTunes Uni there was a scientist who had gone down to some equatorial country to try and locate some gecko species that had seemingly disappeared since the last major study there from years back. The scientists associated it with several degree shifts in the climate IIRC which were driving certain species up higher elevations or something like that.
Anyways lots of articles on large mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, etc. Even one on the earth expiring around 2050 and us requiring more than the planet provides based on resource consumption trends, lol.