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Madagascar`s lost wilderness @ the London `Catastrophes` conference
August 17, 2002In the last 2000 years Madagascar has lost its entire endemic megafauna. This includes giant lemurs, pygmy hippos, elephant birds, and giant tortoises. This loss is the planet`s most recent prehistoric extinction event affecting a region with continental-scale diversity.
Ironically, the island is now a natural laboratory for testing the various competing hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the remarkable global pattern of extinctions in the wake of human expansion.
New research by Dr David Burney has revealed a rich record of evidence concerning human arrival, resource exploitation, fire occurrence, vegetation change, climate variability, biological invasion, extreme marine and geological events, and other ecological dynamics. Integrating these results at the landscape level has allowed explicit testing of models proposed for prehistoric environmental change and extinction by focusing on expectations concerning the ecological rates, patterns, and inferred processes that have been generated by competing hypotheses.
Geological Society of London, The
Geological Society of London, The
Extinction Current Events and Extinction News RSSGlobal warming link to amphibian declines in doubt
Evidence that global warming is causing the worldwide declines of amphibians may not be as conclusive as previously thought, according to biologists. The findings, which contradict two widely held views, could help reveal what is killing the frogs and toads and aid in their conservation.
Death by hyperdisease
It took less than a decade for native rats to become extinct on the Indian Ocean's previously uninhabited Christmas Island once Eurasian black rats jumped ship onto the island at the turn of the 20th century.
Effects of climate change vary greatly across plant families
Drawing on records dating back to the journals of Henry David Thoreau, scientists at Harvard University have found that different plant families near Walden Pond have borne the effects of climate change in strikingly different ways.
Current mass extinction spurs major study of which plants to save
The Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of both plants and animals, with nearly 50 percent of all species disappearing, scientists say.
Running on rocket fuel
In the world of "cut and thrust," humans try to bank money to obtain financial security, and often form cooperatives to reduce risks and increase gains.
New hope for the red squirrel
A number of red squirrels are immune to squirrelpox viral disease, which many believed would lead to the extinction of the species, scientists have discovered.
UGA study reveals ecosystem-level consequences of frog extinctions
Streams that once sang with the croaks, chirps and ribbits of dozens of frog species have gone silent. They're victims of a fungus that's decimating amphibian populations worldwide.
Global warming threatens Australia's iconic kangaroos
As concerns about the effects of global warming continue to mount, a new study published in the December issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology finds that an increase in average temperature of only two degrees Celsius could have a devastating effect on populations of Australia's iconic kangaroos.
Warming in Yosemite National Park sends small mammals packing to higher, cooler elevations
Global warming is causing major shifts in the range of small mammals in Yosemite National Park, one of the nation's treasures that was set aside as a public trust 144 years ago, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.
Smithsonian perspective: Biodiversity in a warmer world
Will climate change exceed life's ability to respond? Biodiversity in a Warmer World, published in the Oct. 10, 2008 issue of the journal, Science, illustrates that cross-disciplinary research fostered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama clearly informs this urgent debate.
More Extinction Current Events and Extinction News Articles
 | Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago by Douglas H. Erwin Some 250 million years ago, the earth suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history. Around 95% of all living species died out--a global catastrophe far greater than the dinosaurs' demise 65 million years ago. How this happened remains a mystery. But there are many competing theories. Some blame huge volcanic eruptions that covered an area as large as the continental United States;... |
 | Extinction Journals by Jeremy Robert Johnson You can survive a nuclear blast. All you need is some luck, and maybe a customized business suit coated in cockroaches. It could work. At least that’s what Dean believed before the bombs actually dropped and his suit led him to murder a Very Important Man at the foot of a blackened obelisk. Now D.C. is looking awfully empty. Life on Earth is pretty much coming to an end. All of... |
 | Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875-1928 by David Wallace Adams The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the... |
 | Extinction (Forgotten Realms: R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider, Book 4) by Lisa Smedman The New York Times best-seller is now in paperback!Now available in paperback, Extinction is the fourth title in the epic Forgotten Realms series about one of the most popular races in the setting. This title landed on the New York Times best-seller list for two straight weeks upon initial hardcover release. Best-selling author R.A. Salvatore wrote the prologue to Extinction and continues to... |
 | Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities: The Causes of Mass Extinctions by Tony Hallam In Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities, renowned geologist Tony Hallam takes us on a tour of the Earth's history, and of the cataclysmic events, as well as the more gradual extinctions, that have punctuated life on Earth throughout the past 500 million years. While comparable books in this field of study tend to promote only one likely cause of mass extinctions, such as extraterrestrial impact,... |
 | When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge by K David Harrison It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison's book is the first to focus on... |
 | The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left Behind by Terry Glavin The Sixth Extinction is a haunting account of the age in which we live. Ecologists are calling it the Sixth Great Extinction, and the world isn’t losing just its ecological legacy; also vanishing is a vast human legacy of languages and our ways of living, seeing, and knowing.Terry Glavin confirms that we are in the midst of a nearly unprecedented, catastrophic vanishing of animals, plants, and... |
 | The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs by David E. Fastovsky, David B. Weishampel Written for non-specialists, this detailed survey of dinosaur origins, diversity, and extinction is designed as a series of successive essays covering important and timely topics in dinosaur paleobiology, such as "warm-bloodedness," birds as living dinosaurs, the new, non-flying feathered dinosaurs, dinosaur functional morphology, and cladistic methods in systematics. Its explicitly phylogenetic... |
 | When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time by Michael Benton "The focus is the most severe mass extinction known in earth's history….The science on which the book is based is up-to-date, thorough, and balanced. Highly recommended."—ChoiceToday it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living. Far less known is a much greater catastrophe that took place at the... |
 | The Late Devonian Mass Extinction (The Critical Moments and Perspectives in Paleobiology and Earth History Series) by George R., Jr. McGhee Based on two decades of research, this book reviews the many theories presented to explain this extinction on Earth, particularly covering the idea that it was triggered by the impact of extraterrestrial objects. It also provides a review of a wealth of different pieces of geographical... |
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