How Many More Species Will Go the Way of the Dinosaur?
According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is the oldest and largest global environmental network, governments have failed to meet targets to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Their recent message says we are now witnessing the greatest extinction crisis since dinosaurs disappeared from our planet 65 million years ago. While critics might counter that IUCN is engaging in hyperbole, claiming that extinction is part of the natural cycle, conservationist Scott McRobert, Ph.D., professor of biology at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pa., says that the urgent tone of the message is accurate, and the current mass extinction has little in common with that prehistoric event. So what is different?