![]() ![]() Overlooked categoryGiant Pinta tortoises on a neighbouring Galapagos island-one of the 11 extinct-in-the-wild species that didn't make it-were not so lucky.Īfter living for half a century as his species' sole survivor, a 75-kilogramme (165-pound) male known as Lonesome George died in 2012. ![]() Fourteen surviving individuals were removed and relocated decades later to another island, where their numbers are increasing.Īlso read: Landmark UN report is a harrowing catalogue of climate misery So has the largest land tortoise in the world, native to Espanola Island in the Galapagos.īy the 1970s, Chelonoidis hoodensis had been eaten to the brink. Red wolves in North America, wild horses in central Asia and the desert-dwelling Arabian oryx have all staged comebacks with a helping human hand. Recent conservation success stories-some of them heroic-include the European bison, which once roamed across Europe.īy the 1920s their numbers were so reduced that surviving specimens were rounded up into zoos and a breeding programme was launched in Poland.Īfter reintroduction into the wild in 1952, the broad-shouldered beasts thrived and are no longer considered threatened with extinction by the Internation Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the keepers of the Red List. "We cannot predict the tipping point that will send ecosystems into a total collapse but it is an inevitable outcome if we do not reverse biodiversity loss." "Currently, we may be losing species at a faster rate than in any of Earth's past extinctions," lead author Yuangeng Huang, a researcher at the China University of Geosciences, told AFP. Success storiesAnother study published last week in Current Biology-looking at the "Great Dying" event 252 million years ago that annihilated 95 percent of life on Earth-showed that accelerated species loss preceded broader ecological collapse. "We have lost 11 species entirely under our care to extinction since 1950."Īlso read: Climate change could devastate emperor penguins "Real opportunities to prevent extinction and return previously lost species to the wild abound and we must take them," the international team of 15 authors said. Scientists say human activity has pushed Earth into the sixth, with species disappearing 100 to 1,000 times more quickly than normal. That was one of five so-called mass extinction events over the last half-billion years. Of these species teetering on the edge, 12 have been reintroduced to some degree back into the wild, according to a pair of studies published last week in the journals Science and Diversity.Īnother 11, however, have gone the way of dinos, dodos and dozens of Pacific island trees, whose delicate flowers will never again grace the planet.īiodiversity loss has reached crisis proportions not seen since an errant asteroid as big across as Paris smashed into Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out land dinosaurs and ending the Cretaceous period. While the category "extinct in the wild" was not added to the benchmark Red List of Threatened Species until 1994, the term could have applied to all of them. Devastation in the Western Ghats in the name of unplanned development ![]()
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