Recreating 130,000 years of mammal food webs shows scope of biodiversity crisis Reconstructing ice age diets reveals unraveling web of life. In the last 50 years, 60% of animal populations have been pushed to extinction. Although already tragic, such losses also have profound impacts on the ecological integrity of biological systems. Research published this week in Science offers the clearest picture yet of the reverberating consequences of land mammal declines on food webs over the past 130,000 years. It’s not a pretty picture. “While about 6% of land mammals have gone extinct in that time, we estimate that more than 50% of mammal food web links have disappeared,” said ecologist Evan Fricke, lead author of the study. “And the mammals most likely to decline, both in the past...
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