Extinction

Credit: An 1862 painting of a Formosan clouded leopard by Joseph Wolf, image in the public domain Source: from Could Extinct Clouded Leopards Be Reintroduced in Taiwan?

For this #MapMonday we return to Yale's Environmental Performance group, featured previously here on #MapMonday. The newly released biodiversity map brings together a whopping amount of data to detail the state (quality not just quantity) of species around the world, and while the staggering diversity of life on our planet is breathtaking (and sometimes pretty [...]

The latest update to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species was published Monday and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t good news. The Red List, the global inventory of species, now identifies 22,413 species as threatened with extinction around the world.

Today marks a sad centennial: the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), a species once so abundant that their flocks blacked out the skies of North America.

For nearly a minute the sky went black. Then it was over. I was standing in a long alley between two four-story brick buildings on a clear sunny day.

A North Texas family, who discovered the skeleton of a 20,000- to 40,000-year-old mammoth while mining through sediment on their farm, is preparing to turn over the remains to a local museum. In May, Wayne McEwen and his family were gathering material from a gravel pit on their property, south of Dallas, when his son struck a 6-foot (1.8 meter) tusk while operating an excavator.

Two or more dead elephants in one place means one thing: poaching by professional killers. Another tip-off is the lack of a face, as poachers hack off the tusks to be sold for ivory.

First-week-of-summer highlights include tech-savvy trees, gloppy oatmeal and vast swarms of now-extinct birds

Human actions may have caused the species’s populations to grow huge as well as led to its demise

Is de-extinction a real possibility?

“If you think Humans are destroying the planet in a way that’s historically unprecedented, you’re suffering from a species-level delusions of grandeur.” -Annalee Newitz, Scatter Adapt, and Remember Perhaps it’s having a 3 month old baby in the house (our second), but I’ve been thinking about the apocalypse more than normal.