Humans are sleepwalking into a mass extinction of species not seen since the dinosaurs
TONY WHITFIELD: ‘Humans are sleepwalking into a mass extinction of species not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs, British scientists warned. Man-made global change is threatening the diversity of different creatures that have taken millennia to evolve to live in niche habitats. Creatures that have moved into delicate ecosystems such as coral reefs often live in symbiosis with others and are the slowest to recover their diversity if damaged… The scientists looked at how the humble caridean shrimp has evolved and diversified since it first appeared in the Lower Jurassic…
Research Fellow Dr Katie Davis, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the University of York explained: “Understanding the processes that shaped the strikingly irregular distribution of species richness across the Tree of Life is a major research agenda. Changes in ecology may go some way to explain the often strongly asymmetrical fates of sister clades, and we test this in the caridean shrimps. There are, depending upon estimates, between two and 50 million extant species of animals (Metazoa), all derived from a single common ancestral species that lived some 650 million years ago. Net rates of speciation therefore exceed rates of extinction, but the balance of these processes varies greatly, both between clades and throughout geological time”.’ SOURCE…
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