Word: extinctionism
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See pictures of the 10 animals facing extinction.
But it turns out that even during the relatively peaceful eras between global calamities, during what is known as background extinction, whole families of species can disappear, pushed out of existence together. And it's not random. According to a new study published in the August 7 issue of Science...
This matters because if extinction were truly random, we'd have a much richer evolutionary history, because at least some representatives of all living things would make it to the present. But because extinction tends to be clumped around certain lineages, when extinction occurs we lose whole groups of species...
The Science study will provide needed ammunition for modern-day conservationists as well. We're in the middle of what some scientists have begun to call the sixth great extinction event, this one caused almost entirely by human beings. Human expansion, hunting, deforestation and ultimately climate change are eliminating species...
Since extinction tends to target groups of vulnerable species, conservationists would be smart to identify and focus their efforts on the most susceptible families. That means species that have a narrow geographic spread - always a risk factor for extinction, in case something happens to their habitat - and, interestingly, large body...