extinction

It has been long believed that dinosaurs went extinct due to an asteroid impact on Earth. A recent discovery may lead to some developments in this theory. Scientists have spotted a mysterious asteroid impact crater on the seafloor which is believed to have formed at the same time when dinosaurs were wiped out from the planet. This could mean that not one, but two asteroid impacts were behind the extinction of dinosaurs.The crater named Nadir is located beneath the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa.…

Of all the species that humanity has wiped off the face of the earth, the thylacine is possibly the most tragic loss. A wolf-sized marsupial sometimes called the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine met its end in part because the government paid its citizens a bounty for every animal killed. That end came recently enough that we have photographs and film clips of the last thylacines ending their days in zoos. Late enough that in just a few decades, countries would start writing laws to prevent other species from seeing the…

The thylacine has long been an icon of human-caused extinction. In the 1800s and early 1900s, European colonizers in Tasmania wrongly blamed the dog-sized, tiger-striped, carnivorous marsupial for killing their sheep and chickens. The settlers slaughtered thylacines by the thousands, exchanging the animals’ scalps for a government bounty. The last known thylacine spent its days pacing a zoo cage in Hobart, Tasmania, and died of neglect in 1936. Now the wolflike creature—also known as the Tasmanian tiger—is poised to…

In a video game climate that bends over backwards to assure you the cute little creatures you play as or with cannot be harmed, it was shocking to hear the mother fox’s neck snap in Endling - Extinction is Forever. I was running with my trio of kits, trying to escape the murderous clutches of a furrier when he caught me. I struggled as he held me down before I heard the crack of the bones as the screen went dark, informing me I had failed as a mother and that my cubs were going to die. And while I thought that was a…

Bacterial colonies would rather perform "evolutionary suicide" than put up with cheater strains that leech off the colony without giving anything back. That's the finding made by a team of researchers who modeled how a colony responds to freeloading bacteria that consume more than their fair share.  Bacteria often work together as a colony to survive, producing resources that are used by other bacteria.For example, bacteria often secrete enzymes that break down food sources into nutrients, which benefits neighboring…

To effectively protect a species, conservationists need key pieces of information: where it lives and what threats it faces. Yet scientists lack these basic data for thousands of species around the world, making it impossible to know how they’re faring—let alone to take steps to ensure their survival. For these “data deficient” species, a new study published in Communications Biology on August 4 suggests that no news is probably not good news. The authors used machine-learning methods to predict the conservation status…

There are thousands of species on Earth that we still don’t know much about — but we now know that they are already teetering on the edge of extinction. A new study used machine learning to figure out just how threatened these lesser-known species are, and the results were grim. Some species of animals and plants are labeled “data deficient” because conservationists haven’t been able to gather enough information about them to understand how they live or how many of them are left. It turns out that those “data…

Evidence discovered by a professor emeritus at Tohoku University in Japan indicates a high correlation between the size of mass extinctions and historical fluctuations in the Earth's temperature. Kunio Kaiho, the climate expert, claims that the current major extinction event will not compare to the previous five — certainly not for several more centuries. Earth has lost most of its species on numerous occasions over the past 540 million years in a relatively small geologic time period. These are known as mass extinction…

A climate scientist at Tohoku University in Japan has run the numbers and does not think today's mass extinction event will equal that of the previous five. At least not for many more centuries to come.  On more than one occasion over the past 540 million years, Earth has lost most of its species in a relatively short geologic time span.These are known as mass extinction events, and they often follow closely on the heels of climate change, whether it be from extreme warming or extreme cooling, triggered by asteroids or…

The relationship between genus and species extinction percentage and surface temperature anomaly in major mass extinctions from the end-Guadalupian crisis, and the current crisis in the Anthropocene. Credit: Kunio Kaiho et al. A professor emeritus at Tohoku University has unearthed evidence pointing to a strong relationship between the magnitude of mass extinctions and global temperature changes in geologic times.…