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Can mankind survive a 6th mass extinction ?

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Maas
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« on: August 20, 2015, 12:22:09 am »

Just because humans populate almost the entire globe does not mean we will be exempt from dying out in the next mass extinction event to hit Earth. Publishing a study in the journal Nature Communications, scientists say widespread species are just as likely to be wiped out in global mass extinctions as rare ones.

Under normal circumstances, species that are widespread are less likely to become extinct than those that occupy smaller geographical areas, with their prevalence providing them with a natural insurance against changes to the environment. However, when it comes to mass extinctions, the same insurance does not apply, with these populous species just as at risk as scarce ones.

The team from the University of Leeds looked at the fossil record of terrestrial vertebrates from the Triassic and Jurassic periods (252 to 145 million years ago). Around 200 million years ago there was a mass extinction event thought to have been triggered by massive volcanic eruptions and climate change. It killed off up to 80% of the species known to have been living on Earth at the time and eventually gave rise to the dinosaurs.

Study leaders Alex Dunhill and Matthew Wills mapped out the geographical distribution of organisms to see how they changed throughout the Triassic-Jurassic periods, which were then compared with biodiversity changes. This provided scientists the relationship between geographic range and extinction risk – the first time this has been done in the terrestrial fossil record.
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