ArticleBiology letters2021
Dark extinction: the problem of unknown historical extinctions.
Article in Biology letters, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global patterns and drivers of extinction risk in island endemic terrestrial vertebrates.Science advances · 2026Article
- Emergent patterns of island biodiversity in the Anthropocene.Science advances · 2026Review
- Harnessing the benefits of herbarium specimen digitisation for inferring recent and ongoing plant extinctions.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Global biodiversity and the expanding Tree of Life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The past and future of known biodiversity: Rates, patterns, and projections of new species over time.Science advances · 2025Article
- Museum genomics suggests long-term population decline in a putatively extinct bumble bee.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Unpacking the extinction crisis: rates, patterns and causes of recent extinctions in plants and animals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- How many mammal species are there now? Updates and trends in taxonomic, nomenclatural, and geographic knowledge.Journal of mammalogy · 2025Article
- The Earth BioGenome Project Phase II: illuminating the eukaryotic tree of life.Frontiers in science · 2025Article
- Recent extinctions of plant and animal genera are rare, localized, and decelerated.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Chronicle of a death foretold:PhytoKeys · 2025Article
- Hidden diversity in anthropophilic sand flies of the Monticola Series (Diptera, Psychodidae).Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The European Reference Genome Atlas: piloting a decentralised approach to equitable biodiversity genomics.npj biodiversity · 2024Article
- Zoofolkloristics: Imagination as a Critical Component.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Postextinction Geographies: Audiovisual Afterlives of the Bucardo and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2024Article
- Genetic diversity and conservation in Bromeliaceae based on SSR markers.Genetics and molecular biology · 2024Article
- The diversity of ignorance and the ignorance of diversity: origins and implications of "shadow diversity" for conservation biology and extinction.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Review
- Article
- Two centuries of biodiversity discovery and loss in Singapore.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Undiscovered bird extinctions obscure the true magnitude of human-driven extinction waves.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The extinction of species before they are discovered and named (dark extinction, DE) is widely inferred as a significant part of species loss in the 'pre-taxonomic' period (approx. 1500-1800 CE) and, to some extent, in the 'taxonomic period' (approx. 1800-present) as well. The discovery of oceanic islands and other pristine habitats by European navigators and the consequent introduction of destructive mammals, such as rats and goats, started a process of anthropogenic extinction. Much ecosystem change happened before systematic scientific recording, so has led to DE. Statistical methods are available to robustly estimate DE in the 'taxonomic period'. For the 'pre-taxonomic period', simple extrapolation can be used. The application of these techniques to world birds, for example, suggests that approximately 56 DEs occurred in the 'taxonomic period' (1800-present) and approximately 180 in the 'pre-taxonomic period' (1500-1800). Targeting collection activities in extinction hotspots, to make sure organisms are represented in collections before their extinction, is one way of reducing the number of extinct species without a physical record (providing that collection efforts do not themselves contribute to species extinction).
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