Even as we speak, species of flora and fauna are going extinct. Scientists are trying to determine the eventual fate of the animal world by correlating them with those that existed before. The future looks bleak.
The main (and critical) difference now is that today’s extinction event is being catalyzed by one single dominant species – man. Only three such cataclysmic extinction events have taken place in the last half a billion years. The one that’s going on in front of our eyes is on the same scale.
John Alroy, a researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University put it in perspective,
“We’re 100 percent responsible for it. There is no precedent at all for what we’re doing. All well-understood extinctions in the deep fossil record are tied to environmental changes that were not triggered by the behavior of individual species, such as the asteroid impact 65 million years ago that wiped out the terrestrial (non-avian) dinosaurs.”
The projections were based by studying the Paleobiology Database. It is an index of nearly 100,000 fossil collections worldwide. It is also a record of Earth’s deadliest extinction event 250 million years ago – the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, also known as the “Great Dying.”.
Alroy studies marine corrals and brachiopods (lamp shells) as a test case because they were plentiful. After the ‘Great Dying’, corals were destroyed completely but they recovered and regained their diversity. But lamp shells did not recover in the same numbers. And those of today exhibit very little characteristics of their predecessors.
The study serves as an example of a species vibrant in numbers and diversity losing out after a mass extinction event. It could be because of competition and resurgence of other species after nature bounces back.
Today’s corals may share the same fate. Other likely victims could be mammals with big body mass, highly indigenous tropical species, and some plants.
Studying past events and birth-death cycles of particular species is of significance because it affords clues as to why one species died out and the other survived.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
