[Home]History of Holocene extinction event/Talk

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Revision 7 . . (edit) December 5, 2001 2:32 am by The Epopt
Revision 6 . . November 30, 2001 3:55 am by Paul Drye
Revision 5 . . November 30, 2001 3:50 am by The Epopt [right on!]
Revision 4 . . November 30, 2001 3:32 am by Zundark [extinction rates?]
Revision 3 . . November 30, 2001 2:42 am by The Epopt [reply]
Revision 2 . . November 29, 2001 10:52 am by Josh Grosse
Revision 1 . . November 29, 2001 4:48 am by The Epopt [moved from [[extinction event]]]
  

Difference (from prior major revision) (minor diff, author diff)

Changed: 24c24,32
:Your wild guess is right on the money. About one million species of animals have been described. (86% are insects, including about 300,000 species of beetles.) Some biologists estimate that up to 50 million more remain to be discovered. Most estimates put the number of plant species at somewhere between 10 million and 30 million, with tentative consensus around 14 million. I have no idea how many more plants they think have not been found yet. So your point is very well-made -- if humanity continues its current rate of eliminating species for another million years or so, we will be as bad as whatever clobbered Earth at the end of the Permian.
:Your wild guess is right on the money. About one million species of animals have been described. (86% are insects, including about 300,000 species of beetles.) Some biologists estimate that up to 50 million more remain to be discovered. Most estimates put the number of plant species at somewhere between 10 million and 30 million, with tentative consensus around 14 million. I have no idea how many more plants they think have not been found yet. So your point is very well-made -- if humanity continues its current rate of eliminating species for another million years or so, we will be as bad as whatever clobbered Earth at the end of the Permian.

::Though this is a case of the apparent support for one side being rather more destructive of the argument than helpful :) A million years at our current pace...wow, I'd never have guessed. I plan on filing this away in my cranium for future (currently vague) use. Probably "Want to know how bad the Permian extinction was" not "We humans aren't so bad", though.



I removed
* the Dodo
* the Great Auk
from the list of Holocene extinction victims only because they are already included under extinct birds.

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