It’ll Take Humanity 7 Million Years To Bring All The Endangered Animals Back

Over decades, humans have destroyed the ecosystem and caused the loss of more than 80% of wild mammals and around half of the plants on earth. We have messed the evolutionary cycle of the planet.

Scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark report that humans will persistently wipe out various species within the next 50 years. And it will take the Earth at least three to five million years to recover the diversity of species.

Many scientists believe that the sixth mass extinction – the period in which the three-quarter of all Earth’s species will be disappeared – is coming.

The last mass extinction event wiped out all of the dinosaurs as well as nearly half of the other species on Earth. It is named Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction, occurred about 65.5 million years ago. The species have to grow for millions of years to recover these events.

However, the decrease in the number of species also makes the natural evolution stops. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature reports that most of the endangered species will disappear within the next 100 years. That’s a consequence of deforestation, pollution, overfishing, increasing global warming, and more.

Matt Davis, a paleontologist, and leader of research from Aarhus University says there are hundreds of species of shrew. Just a number of them have survived through the mass extinction But there were only four species of saber-toothed tigers, all of them went extinct. Mammals, saber-toothed tigers, and giant cloths had few close relatives. When they disappeared, the entire branches of the evolutionary trees were chopped off. The conservationists are worried about the future of endangered animals like black rhinos and Asian elephants.

The researchers calculated the extinction rates against the evolutionary time of a species. Their aim is to determine the time it would take a species to evolve and be back to the current biodiversity.

It will take the Earth’s evolutionary diversity 3-5 million years to recover all species of 2018. And it would take the planet 5-7 million years to bring the animal kingdom back to the time before humanity's existence.

However, that’s not a certainty and it’s just based on the assumption that the destruction wild habitat of humans will stop and the rate of extinction will reduce the long-term severity. But it’s not likely.