SCIENTISTS say the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction caused by human impacts on biodiversity, including habitat loss, hunting, environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change.
The sixth mass extinction sounds very dramatic and is hard for most of us to grasp. Are we really in the grip of a worldwide event of such magnitude? Perhaps scientists are exaggerating. After all, animals are always becoming extinct. Survival of the fittest is the way of the Earth, the climate has always changed from warm to cold and back again; that's just the reality of living on this planet.
Any time, you can walk into a museum, look at the fossils on display, and see the evidence for yourself. Whanganui Regional Museum has many examples in the collection, some of which can be seen in the current exhibition, Te Matapihi -- looking into the museum.
You will see fossilised palm tree nuts that grew in Northland during the Miocene period and a fossil tooth from a woolly mammoth that lived in Alaska during an ice age. You'll also see a massive Megalodon shark tooth uncovered at Pipiriki, dating back to the early Pliocene around five million years ago when that area was under the sea. And look out for the moa bones from the Holocene period, extracted from Whanganui swamps.
Extinction is a natural process. But look a bit closer at the statistics. The natural rate of extinction on Earth is estimated to be one to five species a year, based on analysing fossil records. Scientists predict that -- at current rates of extinction, with dozens of species disappearing every day -- we could lose half Earth's biodiversity by 2050.
