Just 0.7% of the world’s land surface is home to one-third of the world’s most threatened and unique four-legged animals, a recent study has found. In the vast evolutionary tree of life, some animals, like rats, have many closely related species that are at no immediate risk of extinction. But others, like the red panda (Ailurus fulgens), have no close relatives and are the only species in their family, Ailuridae. You would have to travel back 24 million years on the tree of life to find the red panda’s nearest common ancestor with another living species, a group of animals that includes weasels and racoons. Red pandas are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, so if they go extinct, an entire branch on the tree of life would be wiped out. Researchers set out to find the most taxonomically unique and endangered species living in areas where human pressure may force them into extinction, like the red panda. They wanted to identify so-called EDGE Zones, or places with evolutionarily distinct (ED) species that are globally endangered (GE). The researchers focused on tetrapods — vertebrates with four legs. They investigated more than 33,000 species worldwide and identified 25 priority tetrapod EDGE Zones across 33 countries. Together, these EDGE Zones account for just 0.72% of the world’s land surface, but they harbor around one-third of the world’s EDGE tetrapod species. Roughly half of those species are endemic, found nowhere else on Earth. Many EDGE Zones for tetrapods are in the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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South Africa Today – Environment
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