Save for the birds and reptiles, these animals were marsupials - meaning that, like kangaroos, they gave birth to tiny, helpless offspring, which they nurtured with milk in abdominal pouches.
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Within a few thousand years of Humans' arrival in Australia, twenty-three of the twenty-four animal species weighing 100 pounds or more became extinct, as did a large number of smaller species. The entire food chain throughout the Australian ecosystem was broken and rearranged.
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As if that weren't remarkable enough, the Homo Sapien migration to America - which took place around 16,000 years ago - resulted in an even bigger ecological disaster.
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Upon arriving in North America, humans "encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome sabre-tooth cats and giant sloths."
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"South America had an even more exotic menagerie of large mammals, reptiles, and birds. The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation. . . ."
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Within 2,000 years of humans setting foot, most of these species were gone. In North America, thirty-four our of forty-seven genera of large mammals disappeared. In South America, fifty out of sixty. So did thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds, and insects.
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Note that this was all millennia before the Agricultural Revolution, after which events like this repeated themselves many times. Fucking humans, man. Always fucking shit up.
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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist
Any thoughts on plans to reinstate extinct species we killed off via genetic reconstruction? (That's probably not the right technical term for it)
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Replying to @NathanLander
That's a good question. I don't know enough about biology or genetics to say how feasible that is. Though I'd imagine there might be some problems with it. For example, could we determine how that would impact the current ecosystem? Maybe it'd do more damage at this point.
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Replying to @Failed_Buddhist
I don't know much about it either. I heard of it first in a ted talk a couple of years ago. Apparently it's called deextinction now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-extinction …
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That's really fascinating. The argument that de-extinction might be used to help fix climate change is an interesting one. Pretty scary how good humans are getting at manipulating the world around us.
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