time

======
From:
Animal Extinction - the greatest threat to mankind
By the end of the century half of all species will be extinct. Does that matter?
4/30/7 by Julia Whitty
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2494659.ece
...Scientists recognise that species continually disappear at a background extinction rate estimated at about one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost in a sustainable fashion. Occasional mass extinctions convulse this orderly norm, followed by excruciatingly slow recoveries as new species emerge from the remaining gene-pool, until the world is once again repopulated by a different catalogue of flora and fauna.

From what we understand so far, five great extinction events have reshaped earth in cataclysmic ways in the past 439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95 per cent of the life of the day, including the dominant life forms; the most recent event killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Speciations followed, but an analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a die-off.

Today we're living through the sixth great extinction...
======
http://theclimateproject.org
http://tompaine.com
http://amleft.blogspot.com
http://prissypatriot.blogspot.com