Extinction

There is a holocaust happening. Right now. And it's not confined to one nation or even one region. It is a global crisis. Species are going extinct en masse. Every 20 minutes we lose an animal species. If this rate continues, by century's end, 50% of all living species will be gone. It is a phenomenon known as the sixth extinction. The fifth extinction took place 65 million years ago when a meteor smashed into the Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and many other species and opening the door for the rise of mammals.

Federal biologists have concluded that another native fish of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is headed toward extinction, underscoring the region's severe environmental problems. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday that it has determined that longfin smelt in the delta deserve Endangered Species Act protections. But the finding won't expand restrictions on the delta's water operations because the agency is simply designating the fish a candidate for listing.

Lately I see fewer and fewer songbirds, honeybees, butterflies, moths, aphids, wasps, lacewings, beetles and even spiders--all formerly abundant in our Woodland Hills environment. Also, our unpollinated fruit trees produce less and our mockingbirds are mute. It looks as though the poison sprayers are finally winning big. Soon they'll poison us to extinction too. Don Kephart Woodland Hills

Radio drama was thought to be nearly extinct when Yuri Rasovsky launched the National Radio Theater of Chicago in the early 1970s, and he emerged as a major voice in its revival. One of his first productions was a radio adaptation of the 1920 silent horror film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. " By 1978, producer-writer-director Rasovsky and his theater had earned a Peabody Award for the weekly radio plays that aired on a small Chicago station. After seeing the film "Star Wars," Rasovsky was inspired to stage an aural spectacle, so the high school dropout — who had taught himself Greek — produced his own rough translation of the epic "The Odyssey of Homer.

Wolves, bears, frogs and other wild things aren't the only sorts of endangered species. Rare breeds of domestic animals such as Red Wattle pigs and Narragansett turkeys are also threatened with extinction. So are thousands of varieties of vegetables and fruits. Just as wild plants and animals have their environmental champions, so foodies are seeking to preserve the biodiversity of cultivated species and rescue rare delicacies such as California's Sebastopol Gravenstein apple.

The idea that some dinosaurs survived the great extinction 65 million years ago has long tickled the imaginations of authors and filmmakers, who love putting half-dressed women in danger from the claws and jaws of giant creatures often described as "some kinda eating machine." Now comes evidence from a dinosaur-hunter in New Mexico that a population of dinosaurs did indeed survive the cataclysm at the end of the Cretaceous era.

Twelve percent of Mexico's spiny lizard population has been driven to extinction over the last quarter-century by increasing local temperatures, a phenomenon that is linked to global warming, researchers said Thursday. The results suggest that, if warming continues, nearly 40% of all lizard populations globally and 20% of all lizard species could become extinct by 2080, the authors said. Lizards may not be cute and cuddly animals, but they are a valuable link in the global food chain, consuming large amounts of insects and serving as food for larger species.

A massive asteroid may have collided with Earth 251 million years ago and killed 90% of all life, an extinction even more severe than the meteorite impact believed to have snuffed out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. A new study, based on meteorite fragments in Antarctica, suggests that the greatest extinction in the planet's history may have been triggered by a mountain-sized space rock that smashed into a southern land mass.

Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests. The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis published Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The report noted that a separate study estimated that the number of early humans may have fallen as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again.

A layer of rock as thin as a finely honed knife blade has led researchers to conclude that a meteor impact is responsible for a massive global extinction 380 million years ago, similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Brooks B.

A giant tortoise species studied by Charles Darwin and believed to be extinct for more than 150 years may be alive and well, an ambitious genetic survey has revealed. Blood sampling of more than 1,600 tortoises on the largest Galapagos island, Isabela, has revealed that about 84 of them had at least one purebred parent from a supposedly extinct species that once lived at the other end of the archipelago. Researchers hope they can find these tortoises in the flesh on Isabela Island, breed them in captivity and then release them back onto Floreana Island, their native home.

The founder of Facebook, who has himself been the target of legal action, has lent his name to a law. Mark Zuckerberg's Law of Social Sharing refers to his claim that the quantity of information shared online will double every year. The implications of this idea for business are the subject of technology writer Brian Solis' new book published by Wiley, "The End of Business as Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution. " Solis is an Internet zealot.

To find the house that Alan Donovan built, drive a few miles southeast from the heart of Kenya's traffic-snarled capital and pull onto an abruptly quiet road toward the savanna. The African Heritage House, which overlooks the great, still plain of Nairobi National Park, is both a trove of a continent's aesthetic richness and a mausoleum of its extinct wonders. Donovan, 70, was born in Colorado and attended UCLA but has lived in Africa since the U.S. State Department sent him to Nigeria as a relief officer in 1967.

This season "Terra Nova" has exhumed the Cretaceous period, but can it also help resurrect another block of time that would seem equally challenging to revive — the family viewing hour? The heavily promoted prime-time show, dubbed internally at Fox as "Little House on the Prairie with Dinosaurs," is an eco-action-adventure series built around a family of five that travels back 85 million years to give humans a second chance at caring for Earth. The ratings have been solid for the show, which counts Steven Spielberg and former News Corp.

Reporting from San Francisco -- The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Wednesday that the Franciscan manzanita — a plant so rare that only one is believed to be growing in the wild — "warrants protection" and proposed declaring the elusive shrub endangered. The announcement kicks off a 60-day public comment period to allow the federal agency to figure out whether it is possible or necessary to designate and protect habitat critical to the plant's survival and to finalize its determination.

I still remember the last time I ate shark's fin, in a grand, now-defunct Monterey Park seafood palace, more than 15 years ago. This restaurant had been proud of its pricey shark's-fin specialties, so much so that it showcased its finest specimens in glass cases, where they had the stark, ghostly presence of museum displays, although by this time some connoisseurs had moved on to the rarer, costlier pleasures of sun-dried abalone farmed in Japan....

Contemplating the fragility of life at the individual, racial and species levels, EM Lewis' new drama, "Song of Extinction," artfully balances its theme of mortality between the intimate and the macroscopic. Revolving around the tenuous connection between an alienated high school biology teacher and a troubled student, Lewis' lyrical text explores inner psychological states with remarkable eloquence and clarity -- ably depicted by a first-rate Moving Arts cast. The teacher, Khim Phan (Darrell Kunitomi)

New evidence strongly suggests that the greatest extinction event in Earth's history -- the so-called Great Dying that wiped out more than 90% of marine species and 80% of those on land -- was caused by a meteorite impact off the coast of what is now Australia, UC Santa Barbara researchers said Thursday.

The Franciscan manzanita — described by some as San Francisco's unicorn — thrives in a kind of botanical witness protection program. Only one specimen of the low-growing shrub exists anywhere in the wild; until recently, it was believed to be extinct, having fallen victim generations ago in this city's battle between nature and development. Today, the manzanita occupies a 7-square-foot patch of hillside in a 1,500-acre national park known as the Presidio of San Francisco.

In this village that still bears the name of the old Santa Barbara sugar plantation, Susana Baca is trudging through a field of sweet potatoes. Not 48 hours earlier, the internationally acclaimed diva of Afro-Peruvian music returned from Paris, the last stop in her latest world tour. But on this day, she is visiting her mother's tumbledown hometown, a neglected part of Peru that is the cradle of its multiethnic history, where the descendants of black slaves and Chinese and Japanese field hands have lived together for generations, intermarried and even now continue to work the land.