A major extinction event is taking place, with many wondering what animals will disappear from the planet forever.
Corals, big mammals and many tropical species could all go extinct in the not too distant future, predict scientists who are attempting to forecast the fate of today's animals by studying what happened to those in the distant past.
A complication is that no prior mass extinction event on the planet was driven by a single species. In a period of more than a half-billion years, only three such extinction events appear to have been as devastating as the present one, which is being caused by humans.
"We're 100 percent responsible for it," John Alroy, a researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, told Discovery News.
"There is no precedent at all for what we're doing," he added. "All well-understood extinctions in the deep fossil record are tied to environmental changes that were not triggered by the behavior of individual species, such as the asteroid impact 65 million years ago that wiped out the terrestrial (non-avian) dinosaurs."
Alroy used the Paleobiology Database, which compiles data from nearly 100,000 fossil collections worldwide, to track the fate of major groups of animals during Earth's most massive extinction event 250 million years ago: the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, also known as the "Great Dying."
Alroy, whose findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Science, focused on marine animals, since the fossil record includes many such species.
He determined that two of the most important and plentiful groups of marine animals 250 million years ago were corals and brachiopods, also called lamp shells. After the Great Dying, corals were almost wiped out.
Author: Jennifer Viegas | Source: msnbc [September 02, 2010]