Forest scincid lizard on Christmas Island and 12 animals on the list, including the desert bettong, large cheeked jumping mouse, and arena barred wallaby. The government of Australia has formally acknowledged that 13 of the endemic species went into extinction and this includes 12 mammals and the earliest reptile known to have vanished since the colonization by the Europeans.
The increase of the dozen species of mammal species shows the inevitable position of Australia as the capital for the world mammal extinction, raising the entire number of species known to have gone into extinction to 34.
No one out of the 13 seems like a surprise. Almost all of the species extinctions are memorable, with most of them vanishing between the 1850s and 1950s. But the record also comprises two species that got lost, the pair from Christmas Island in the ocean of Indian over the last decade.
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Previous Species of Bat Passed Away
According to Guardian Australia, the previous species of bat on Christmas Island passed away in 2009. The only remaining forest skink on Christmas Island also followed in 2014, becoming the number one reptile in Australia reptile known to have gone into extinction.
Previously, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recorded the two extinction. The current list means that over 10% of the 320 land species believed to have existed in 1788 in Australia are no more.
Suzanne Milthorpe of the Wilderness Society revealed that there was no other country, poor or rich that has something like this list in the extinction of mammals. According to her, Haiti was the next for mammal extinction on the list of IUCN with a total of nine.
A conservation biologist, Prof John Woinarski from Charles Darwin University who assisted in recording the plight of most of the recently listed species that went in extinct into two books. He said the recordings were saddening and humbling.
He stated that it is a remembrance that extinction was likely to happen after a mammal was listed as endangered except enough was done to save the species.
Accepting the Losses
Woinarski said It is very important to accept that the losses have happened and it's a recall that if we don't take care of our endangered species, then the end result of it is extinction.
The verified extinction of mammals in history mammal are the desert bettong, the Capricorn rabbit rat, the Nullarbor dwarf bettong, the large cheeked jumping mouse, the Liverpool Plains striped wallaby, the south-eastern striped wallaby, the Nullarbor barred wallaby, the long-eared mouse and blue-grey mouse, the flying fox of Percy Island and the marl.
Nearly 100 endemic species of Australia have been recorded by the government or the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as extinct but Prof Woinarski disclosed that the genuine number was 10 times more than the counted invertebrates.
Over 50 of this invertebrate mammals on Christmas Island were likely to be extinct for more than a century.
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