These Are the Animals Scientists Predict Will Go Extinct Next
In the Dr. Seuss children’s book Horton Hears a Who!, Horton the elephant goes to great lengths to protect the planet of Whoville, so tiny that it exists on a single speck of dust. It turns out, though, that Horton should have been worried about himself, too: According to new research on island-dwelling species, the tiniest and largest are most threatened with extinction.
An international team of evolutionary biologists led a study into the Hortons and Whos of the world’s islands, finding that the more they differed in body mass from their mainland counterparts, the greater their risk of going extinct. This conclusion becomes all the more dire based on the team’s additional finding that humans’ arrival to distant islands around 12,000 years ago escalated extinctions rates more than tenfold. Their study was published on March 9 in Science.
“We found that species that underwent more extreme changes in body size—that is, the more extreme dwarfs and giants—were more likely to be threatened or to go extinct,” Roberto Rozzi, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin and a co-author of the study, told The Daily Beast in an email. “Ultimately, many of our dwarfs and giants become so ecologically naive as to perish under what Darwin described as ‘the stranger’s craft of power’—the often devastating effects of non-native species, including humans.”