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The human-caused extinction of hundreds of bird species over the past 130,000 years has led to a substantial reduction in bird functional diversity -- a measure of the range of different roles and functions birds perform in the environment -- and resulted in the loss of about 3 billion years of unique evolutionary history, according to a new study published today in Science.
While humans have been driving the global erosion of species richness for millennia, the consequences of past extinctions for other dimensions of biodiversity are poorly understood. (University of Birmingham, more at sciencedaily.com)
