SF News – A study of regions on our planet that have just recently been inhibited by mankind revealed that human advancement has helped the extinction of over one thousand bird species, says ecologist Richard Duncan of University of Canberra, Australia.
Duncan says that tropical landscapes were once dominated by numerous bird species but many of them disappeared in a short period of time after humans arrived.
The information has been derived from fossils collected from islands such as Samoan Islands, Fiji and Marianas which have only been colonized by humans since about 3500 years ago or Hawaii islands that go back to only 700 years.
The number of bird species, estimated to have been extinct as a result of human colonization, is between 800 to up to 2000 various kinds. But Duncan says that many of the extinct bird species still remain to be discovered as the fossil records are extensively incomplete.
In this study, researchers looked at 41 different islands in the eastern Pacific. These islands are considered to be among the last regions on Earth to be colonized by humans. As mankind began to occupy these islands, bird populations became extinct and their habitat became limited or was removed totally as the result of deforestation in favor of human occupation.
