Will the cow be the last big mammal?
At the current rate of species extinction, we could end up one day in front of the strange situation where the largest surviving mammal on Earth would be ... the cow.
If our friend has indeed a bright future ahead of her, we can not say the same for large mammals, whose golden age seems to belong to the past. A new estimate of extinct species over the last 10 million years tends to confirm that the largest mammals began to disappear when Homo sapiens set foot on their respective continents.
Biologist Felisa Smith and her team at the University of New Mexico published these results on April 19 in Science . Their list leads to the passage to remove the other factor often pointed at the finger, climatic variations: over the past 125 000 years, the extinction rate of large mammals , especially the very large, can not be explained only by the human presence. After mammoths and mastodons, several species of horses and camels, the next on the list could therefore be elephants, rhinos and giraffes
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