An alternate explanation of the red fox's gains involves the gray wolf: Historically, it has kept red fox numbers down, but as the wolf has been hunted to near extinction in much of its former range, the red fox population has grown larger, and it has taken over the niche of top predator.

The Dodo achieved widespread recognition from its role in the story of Alice in Wonderland, and it has since become a fixture in popular culture, often as a symbol of extinction and obsolescence.

In the case of total life extinction, a similar factor may be applicable for f < sub > ℓ </ sub >, that is, how many times life may appear on a planet where it has appeared once.

* Renaissance Workshop Company the company which has saved many rare and some relatively unknown instruments from extinction.

This extinction of American megafauna has been explained as caused by the arrival of the ancestors of Amerindians ; though most scientists assert that climatic change also contributed.

The climate change theory has suggested that a change in climate near the end of the late Pleistocene stressed the megafauna to the point of extinction.

For example, the only pinniped ever known to the Caribbean, the Caribbean monk seal once occurred in Jamaican waters and has now been driven to total extinction.

Deforestation in the vicinity of the lake has had many negative impacts, including loss of forest birds, extinction of native salmon, and increased amounts of sediment flowing into the lake.

There has been a lively scientific debate as to whether other major extinctions, including the ones at the end of the Permian and Triassic periods might also have been the result of large impact events, but the evidence is much less compelling than for the end Cretaceous extinction.

A definitive explanation for their mass extinction has yet to be agreed upon.

For example geochemical signatures from rocks may help to discover when life first arose on Earth, and analyses of carbon isotope ratios may help to identify climate changes and even to explain major transitions such as the Permian – Triassic extinction event .< ref name =" Twitchett "> A relatively recent discipline, molecular phylogenetics, often helps by using comparisons of different modern organisms ' DNA and RNA to re-construct evolutionary " family trees "; it has also been used to estimate the dates of important evolutionary developments, although this approach is controversial because of doubts about the reliability of the " molecular clock ".

Further doubt has been cast on this theory based on fossils in Greenland showing the extinction to have been gradual, lasting about eighty thousand years, with three distinct phases.

The extinction of the Passenger Pigeon has two major causes: commercial exploitation of pigeon meat on a massive scale and loss of habitat.

Since the time of peak production in 1971, when Biwa pearl farmers produced six tons of cultured pearls, pollution has caused the virtual extinction of the industry.

The Persian Gulf has hosted some of the most magnificent marine fauna and flora, some of which are near extinction or at serious environmental risk.

Much confusion has arisen over what proponents of punctuated equilibrium actually argued, what mechanisms they advocated, how fast the punctuations were, what taxonomic scale their theory applied to, how revolutionary their claims were intended to be, and how punctuated equilibrium related to other ideas like quantum evolution, saltationism, and mass extinction.

The sudden appearance of most species in the geologic record and the lack of evidence of substantial gradual change in most species — from their initial appearance until their extinction — has long been noted, including by Charles Darwin who appealed to the imperfection of the record as the favored explanation.

The taxonomy of the red wolf has been debated since before efforts began in 1973 to save it from extinction.

Sexual selection sometimes creates monstrously absurd features that, in harder times, could help cause a species ' extinction, as has been suggested for the giant antlers of the Irish Elk ( Megaloceros giganteus ) that became extinct in Pleistocene Europe.

The study suggests that religion is headed towards ' extinction ' in various nations where it has been on the decline: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

For example, the Chicxulub Crater, which was caused by an impact that has been implicated in the extinction of the dinosaurs, was localized to Central America by analyzing ejecta in the Cretaceous – Paleogene boundary, and then physically proven to exist using seismic maps from oil exploration.

Humanity has retreated into deep underground cities, but the radioactivity is slowly affecting them as well, with mankind's extinction estimated in one year.

Dramatic declines in amphibian populations, including population crashes and mass localized extinction, have been noted in the past two decades from locations all over the world, and amphibian declines are thus perceived as one of the most critical threats to global biodiversity.

Abalones have been identified as one of the many classes of organism threatened with extinction due to acidification of oceans from anthropogenic carbon dioxide, as reduced pH erodes their shells.

This particular ecological niche buffered them from extinction .< ref > Similar, but more complex patterns have been found in the oceans.

Several impact craters and massive volcanic activity, such as that in the Deccan Traps, have been dated to the approximate time of the extinction event.

In stream communities few animal groups became extinct because stream communities rely less directly on food from living plants and more on detritus that washes in from land, buffering them from extinction .< ref > Similar, but more complex patterns have been found in the oceans.

The ammonoids utilized a planktonic strategy of reproduction ( numerous eggs and planktonic larvae ), which would have been devastated by the K – Pg extinction event.

Neornithines may have been able to survive the extinction as a result of their abilities to dive, swim, or seek shelter in water and marshlands.

A severe regression would have greatly reduced the continental shelf area, which is the most species-rich part of the sea, and therefore could have been enough to cause a marine mass extinction.

However research concludes that this change would have been insufficient to cause the observed level of ammonite extinction.

In 2004, Botanical Society of America's Plant Science Bulletin disputed Dr. Temple's research as flawed which published evidence as to why the dodo's extinction did not directly cause the increasing disappearance of young trees including suggestion that tortoises would have been more likely to disperse the seeds than dodo hence discrediting Temple's view as to the dodo and the tree's sole survival relationship.

Three theories have been advanced to explain the mass extinction.

An examination of swamp sediment cores spanning the last 130, 000 years from Lynch ’ s Crater in Queensland suggests that hunting may have been the primary cause of the extinction.

They were originally identified as outliers to a general trend of decreasing extinction rates during the Phanerozoic, but as more stringent statistical tests have been applied to the accumulating data, the " Big Five " cannot be so clearly defined, but rather appear to represent the largest ( or some of the largest ) of a relatively smooth continuum of extinction events.

Red foxes have been introduced into Australia which lacks similar carnivores other than the dingo, and the introduced foxes prey on native wildlife, some to the point of extinction.

The North Atlantic population may have been hunted to extinction in the 18th century.

Extinctions that are due to human activity ( anthropogenic ), particularly hypothesized future events, have also been labelled the anthropocene extinction.

Three hypotheses have been proposed to explain the extinction of megafauna in the late Pleistocene.

Although Ross McPhee proposed that a hyper-disease may have been the cause of the extinction, the study by Lyons et al., demonstrated conclusively that a hyperdisease was unlikely to have caused the extinction.

The Bowhead whale was locally hunted to near extinction around 1640 ( approximately 1000 had been killed and processed on the island ), at which time Jan Mayen was abandoned and stayed uninhabited for two and a half centuries.

Fossils very similar to V. komodoensis have been found in Australia dating to greater than 3. 8 million years ago, and its body size remained stable on Flores, one of the handful of Indonesian islands where it is currently found, over the last 900, 000 years, " a time marked by major faunal turnovers, extinction of the island's megafauna, and the arrival of early hominids by 880 ka.