ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- From pixels to conservation: Deep learning for automated monitoring of rare and endangered wildlife.iScience · 2026Article
- Low-Cost Monitoring of Spatiotemporal Changes in Forest Cover: Implications for Conservation in a Case in Quindío (Colombia).Environmental management · 2026Article
- Harnessing the benefits of herbarium specimen digitisation for inferring recent and ongoing plant extinctions.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Prediction of the Potential Distribution of Common Pochard (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Silent Erosion: Impact of Forest Logging on Genetic Diversity in Tropical Understorey Birds.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Fire and Snow: Effects of Snowpack Variation and Wildfire on Small Mammal Dynamics in Sub-Alpine Habitats.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Global biodiversity and the expanding Tree of Life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Review
- Comparative physiology and biomimetics in metabolic and environmental health: what can we learn from extreme animal phenotypes?Diabetologia · 2026Review
- Biobanking biodiversity: recent strategies, challenges, and opportunities.The Journal of reproduction and development · 2026Review
- De-extinction of the Northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni).The Journal of reproduction and development · 2026Review
- Article
- Digitisation of historical specimens from the Hog Island Audubon Camp Natural History Collection, Maine.Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- Unknown Germany - An integrative biodiversity discovery program.npj biodiversity · 2025Review
- A modeling approach to quantify ecological dynamics and functional structures of paleocommunities.Nature protocols · 2025Review
- Conservation genomics of two endangered buntings reveal genetic diversity before and after severe population declines.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Recent extinctions of plant and animal genera are rare, localized, and decelerated.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- A systemic risk assessment methodological framework for the global polycrisis.Nature communications · 2025Review
- Global scale assessment of the human-induced extinction crisis of terrestrial carnivores.Science advances · 2025Article
- Species richness variation in marine and terrestrial fauna across widespread, fragmented territories: assessing inherent challenges of data scarcity at local and regional scales.Scientific reports · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mass extinctions during the past 500 million y rapidly removed branches from the phylogenetic tree of life and required millions of years for evolution to generate functional replacements for the extinct (EX) organisms. Here we show, by examining 5,400 vertebrate genera (excluding fishes) comprising 34,600 species, that 73 genera became EX since 1500 AD. Beyond any doubt, the human-driven sixth mass extinction is more severe than previously assessed and is rapidly accelerating. The current generic extinction rates are 35 times higher than expected background rates prevailing in the last million years under the absence of human impacts. The genera lost in the last five centuries would have taken some 18,000 y to vanish in the absence of human beings. Current generic extinction rates will likely greatly accelerate in the next few decades due to drivers accompanying the growth and consumption of the human enterprise such as habitat destruction, illegal trade, and climate disruption. If all now-endangered genera were to vanish by 2,100, extinction rates would be 354 (average) or 511 (for mammals) times higher than background rates, meaning that genera lost in three centuries would have taken 106,000 and 153,000 y to become EX in the absence of humans. Such mutilation of the tree of life and the resulting loss of ecosystem services provided by biodiversity to humanity is a serious threat to the stability of civilization. Immediate political, economic, and social efforts of an unprecedented scale are essential if we are to prevent these extinctions and their societal impacts.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.