Scientists are uncovering previously unknown species preserved in museum and botanical garden collections, only to find that they no longer exist in the wild.
Even some species that are found while they are still alive are already on the brink. In fact, research suggests that it’s precisely the newly described species that tend to have the highest risk of going extinct. Many new species are only now beingbecause they’re rare, isolated, or both—factors that also make them easier to wipe out, said Fraga.
While extinction is likely for many of these cases, it’s often hard to prove. The IUCN requires targeted searches to declare an extinction—something that Costa is still planning on doing for the killifish, four years after its discovery. But these surveys cost money, and they aren’t always possible. Meanwhile, some scientists have turned to computational techniques to estimate the scale of dark extinction, by extrapolating rates of species discovery and extinctions among known species. When Chisholm’s groupthis method to the estimated 195 species of birds in Singapore, they estimated that 9.6 undescribed species have vanished from the area in the past 200 years, in addition to the disappearance of 58 known species.
that the proportion of dark extinctions could account for up to just over a half of all extinctions, depending on the region and species group. Of course, “the main challenge in estimating dark extinction is that it is exactly that: an estimate. We can never be sure,” noted Quentin Cronk, a botanist of the University of British Columbia who has produced similar
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