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ShareIn biology and ecology, extinction is the cessation of existence of a species or group of taxa, reducing biodiversity.
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The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of that species (although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point).
Because a species potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively.
This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "re-appears" (typically in the fossil record) after a period of apparent absence. Through evolution, new species are created by speciation - where new varieties of organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological niche - and species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition.
A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance, although some species, called living fossils, survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
For more information about the topic Extinction, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
Extinction event — An extinction event (also extinction-level event, ELE) occurs when a large number of species die out in a relatively short period of time. Since life ... > read more
Ecological niche — In ecology, a niche is a term describing the relational position of a species or population in an ecosystem. More formally, the niche includes how a ... > read more
Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event — The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event was a period of massive extinction of species, about 65.5 million years ago. It corresponds to the end of ... > read more
Permian-Triassic extinction event — The Permian-Triassic (P-T or PT) extinction event, sometimes informally called the Great Dying, was an extinction event that occurred approximately ... > read more
Smilodon — Smilodon means knife tooth, an entirely appropriate name given its enormous fangs. The smilodon species are also known as Saber-Toothed Cats (which ... > read more
Trophic level — In ecology, the trophic level is the position that an organism occupies in a food chain - what it eats, and what eats it. Wildlife biologists look at ... > read moreRecommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
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