![]() Hopefully, knowing the importance of healthy habitats and learning from the experiences with keystone species, we can keep any more animals from going extinct by the careless actions of humans. Now many very endangered animals are being watched and taken care of in the hopes of their return to safe numbers. It may be too late for many species that have gone extinct throughout the world in recent times because of the actions of humans, like the passenger pigeon, stellar sea cow, dodo, moa and quagga – all of which have disappeared in the last 400 years. ![]() Today, we are aware of the importance of protecting endangered species and their habitats. If humans affected certain important keystone species by over hunting, it could have triggered many other extinctions as well. Another reason could have been that early man had finally migrated to reach North America and started hunting. Climate change could have been one reason, because during that time there was a dramatic change in the Earth’s climate as world temperature rose at the end of the last ice age. Scientists have many theories about what happened to cause the end-Pleistocene extinctions. ![]() This was when North American animals like the woolly mammoth, mastodon, ground sloth, horse, camel, and lion disappeared. This was where a lot of large animals went extinct in a short period of time, many of them right here in North America. Scientists studying the fossil record have found that there were five big mass extinctions prehistorically where whole orders of animals died out.Ī smaller, but important extinction happened about 14,000 years ago, called the end-Pleistocene extinctions. We know from the fossil record that thousands of prehistoric species of animals and plants have lived on Earth and over time went extinct, including all the dinosaurs. In fact most extinctions happened millions of years before humans even lived on Earth. ![]() In studying man and the environment, it is easy to think that humans have caused all the extinctions of animals in the world so far. ![]()
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