With the globe heating up, and public opinion with it, the idea that has gained traction. This traction is deserved, we are causing extinction at an alarmingly high rate, but a new discovery may point to us not being alone in this regard. we, humans, an individual species, are causing a mass extinction through our actions A study performed by scientists from Vanderbilt University is now pointing to Earth's first mass extinction event, the End-Ediacaran Extinction 540 million years ago , as having been caused by nature itself.
The Ediacaran extinction involved the loss of two major groups of life: Ediacara biota, some of the earliest complex multicellular organisms, and calcifying organisms like Cloudina and Namacalathus. This information is not new. What is new is how this all occurred. Previously, scientists were divided between three hypotheses for why the Ediacarans and others went extinct: global geochemical perturbations, a simple artefact in the data, or biotic replacement. What the scientists publishing this study have found was that preserved Ediacara biota had low genus richness, suggesting vulnerability to extinction, and that sediment data from the time period show a lack of hypersalinity or oxygen stress, disproving the theory of geochemical changes. Together, these factors point to an extinction caused by the replacement of early immobile organisms like the Ediacara biota with newer mobile animals; however, more sites will need to be examined.Thus, humans may not be alone in causing the destruction of environments in order to replace them with our own: sponges beat us to it by 540 million years.
Source: Biotic replacement and mass extinction of the Ediacara biota
The Ediacaran extinction involved the loss of two major groups of life: Ediacara biota, some of the earliest complex multicellular organisms, and calcifying organisms like Cloudina and Namacalathus. This information is not new. What is new is how this all occurred. Previously, scientists were divided between three hypotheses for why the Ediacarans and others went extinct: global geochemical perturbations, a simple artefact in the data, or biotic replacement. What the scientists publishing this study have found was that preserved Ediacara biota had low genus richness, suggesting vulnerability to extinction, and that sediment data from the time period show a lack of hypersalinity or oxygen stress, disproving the theory of geochemical changes. Together, these factors point to an extinction caused by the replacement of early immobile organisms like the Ediacara biota with newer mobile animals; however, more sites will need to be examined.Thus, humans may not be alone in causing the destruction of environments in order to replace them with our own: sponges beat us to it by 540 million years.
Source: Biotic replacement and mass extinction of the Ediacara biota