extinction
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One of Australia’s Tiniest Mammals Is Heading Straight for Extinction If We Don’t Act Now
They weigh around 15 grams, the same as a 50 cent coin. They devour vast quantities of insects. And they’re in real trouble. Our new research has found the critically endangered southern bent-wing bat is continuing to decline. Its populations are centred on just three “maternity” caves in southeast South Australia and southwest Victoria, where…
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Extinction Crisis: Native Mammals Are Disappearing in Northern Australia, but Only a Few People Are Watching
At the time Australia was colonised by Europeans, an estimated 180 mammal species lived in the continent’s northern savannas. The landscape teemed with animals, from microbats to rock-wallabies and northern quolls. Many of these mammals were found nowhere else on Earth. An unidentified account from the Normanton district of Northwest Queensland, dating back to 1897,…
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Climate Change Wiped Out the Mammoth, New DNA Study Shows
Humans are very rarely the good guys in extinction narratives, given our proclivity for pushing species to the brink of extinction, and often over it. But we’re almost certainly absolved of guilt in the case of the woolly mammoth, according to an international team of scientists who spent the past 10 years sifting through traces…
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Paleontologists Study 9,000-Year-Old Aurochs Bones and Wonder if the Beasts Were Tamed
For some 9,000 years, the bones of three aurochs — huge, extinct ancestors of modern cattle — languished at the bottom of a cave in northwestern Spain. A team of paleontologists have now genetically sampled the Mesolithic remains, which were found in the 1990s near a human skeleton, and they believe that the DNA could help…