Big fish said most endangered as hunting upends primeval trend

By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - Big fish and other large ocean creatures face higher risks of extinction than small ones, overturning a 500 million-year pattern and indicating that human hunting is to blame, scientists said on Wednesday. Fossils from five mass extinction events, most recently when an asteroid struck the Earth 65 million years ago, showed that small marine animals were slightly more likely to be wiped out than big ones in the pre-historic cataclysms, a study published in the journal Science said. By contrast, large modern fish such as tuna and sharks, as well as mammals including whales and seals were more likely to be on a global "Red List" of endangered species than small fish and molluscs.