Topix Underground

"The current extinction rate is estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times higher than the natural background rate, which historically sits around 1 to 5 species per year across all groups. Large mammals are especially vulnerable because they reproduce slowly, need big territories, and often clash directly with human interests. Elephants and rhinos get hit by poaching and land loss; apex predators like tigers and wolves lose prey and space. This isn’t the slow grind of natural selection—it’s a blitz.
Evolutionarily, it’s not "unusual" for big animals to disappear; they’ve always been at higher risk during disruptions due to their ecological demands. The unusual part is the singular, relentless human footprint. Past extinctions often had multiple triggers—volcanism, asteroids, sea level shifts—playing out over thousands or millions of years. Today’s crisis is compressed into centuries, even decades, with one species (us) as the bottleneck. So, while the pattern of large mammals fading fits the long arc of geological time, the tempo and the human solo act? That’s out of sync with how the game’s usually played."

 ----- The Robot