Formally dubbed the Holocene extinction, the sixth mass extinction could be the signal that the end of human race is underway following the fifth mass extinction about 65 million years ago when dinosaurs were wiped out, according to a new research claiming that humans are to blame.
Published on Science Advances, the study titled "Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction" was authored by Paul Ehrlich, Andres Garcia, Robert Pringle, Todd Palmer, Anthony Barnosky, and Gerardo Ceballos, the study's lead author who is a senior ecological researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
According to Ceballos, "life would take many millions of years to recover" and humans "would likely disappear early on" in the human-caused Holocene extinction.
Pointing out that around 477 vertebrate species have been lost since 1900, the researchers said the Desert Rat Kangaroo, the Chinese Paddlefish, the Emperor Rat, the Skunk Frog Yangtze and the River Dolphin, and among hundreds of others, are among the species believed to have become extinct.
There should have only been nine species going extinct if not because of man-made environmental changes such as global warming, overfishing, poaching and deforestation, and the window of opportunity to save endangered species, habitat and populations is rapidly closing, the researchers explained.
In the past five mass extinctions on Earth, the culprits blamed for wiping out around 50 to 95 percent of all of the living species on Earth are meteors, volcanic eruptions and other large-scale natural disasters such as, according to CNN.