Green Options

“The United States is in a sense climate illiterate still,” Hans Schellnhuber, the director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said earlier this week.

He wasn’t just comparing the US to the EU, however. Even developing nations seem to know more about the issue and the potential results of inaction.

It is estimated that man has been in Oceania for up to 125,000 years. The land was there before man. And for a long time a balance has been found between man and nature. Perhaps that balance was achieved because man and nature were not separate entities, but one and the same. However, in the recent past, that balance has been disturbed by population and consumption. Man became an invader rather than an aboriginal. And with that, habit loss for other species has been a concern. And now life isn’t what it used to be in Oceania.

It is such an invasion, not just by humans, but species of both flora and fauna that threatens aboriginal life in Oceania. A new study, which was published in the international journal Conservation Biology expresses the need for governments to act quickly in order to halt the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of species.

The current rate of extinction is 100 to 1000 times higher than the average, or background rate, making our current period the 6th major mass extinction in the planet’s history.

Although fossil reconstructions or pictorial representations can sometimes be difficult to connect with, it’s impossible to ignore the experience of seeing a photograph of an animal on the brink of extinction.

Thus, what follows is a list of 11 extinct animals that were photographed while still alive.

Tasmanian Tiger

Eight years after starting their efforts, scientists in India still believe they will be able to resurrect the long-extinct Indian Cheetah if they can acquire the cell line of the closely related Asiatic Cheetah, which lives in Iran.

“If a cell line made from the Cheetah was available, it would have been possible to resurrect the species,” said S. Shivaji, a scientist at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.It seems there are at present a few Cheetahs in Iran. If tissue or cell samples could be procured from Iran it should be possible to clone the Cheetah using Leopard as a surrogate mother.”

But should species that have already gone extinct be brought back through cloning?