Credit: Copyright Save the Rhino International

Humans are killing off species thousands of times faster than nature creates them, new research finds.

The modern rate of extinction across species is 1,000 times that of the background rate before humans began altering the globe and thousands of times faster than the creation of new species, according to a new study in the journal Conservation Biology. The findings echo and expand on previous research published in the journal Science, which also suggested that humans are on the verge of causing a sixth mass extinction on Earth.

“We now know for certain how much faster species are going extinct,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University and president of the nonprofit conservation group Saving Species.

To put it in concrete terms, Pimm told Live Science, without human activities, the planet should lose a bird species only about once every 1,000 years. In actuality, at least 150 species of birds have gone extinct in the last 500 years alone, according to conservation partnership BirdLife International. [6 […]