![]() Milthorpe, the Wilderness Society’s national environment laws campaign manager, said the updated list was a “devastating reality check on Australia’s environmental performance”. “That was one we really should have been able to save,” he said. There had never been an inquest or inquiry to find out what went wrong, he said. He said the Christmas Island pipistrelle’s extinction was a result of a lack of government action, as it had been clear it was in rapid decline for two decades before it went extinct and the response was insufficient. The Christmas Island forest skink was almost certainly killed by the accidental introduction of a predator from Asia, the wolf snake, in the 1970s. He said the first recorded modern extinction of an Australian reptile was “obviously a really lamentable landmark”. At least 50 invertebrate species on Christmas Island alone had not been seen for more than a century and were likely to be extinct, he said. He said as museums had few-to-no records of the species, recording the extinctions often relied on knowledge shared by Indigenous elders living in remote parts of the country who had experienced them first-hand.Ībout 100 endemic Australian species have been listed as extinct by the government or the IUCN, but Woinarski said the real number was likely to be more than 10 times that once extinct invertebrates were counted. “No other country has suffered anywhere near that number of mammal species extinctions over the past 200 years,” he said. Woinarski said in almost all cases the most plausible explanation for their extinction was predation by feral cats, though introduced foxes, habitat destruction and fire may have played a role. The confirmed historic mammal extinctions are the desert bettong, the Nullarbor dwarf bettong, the Capricorn rabbit-rat, the broad-cheeked hopping mouse, the Liverpool Plains striped bandicoot, the marl, the south-eastern striped bandicoot, the Nullarbor barred bandicoot, the long-eared mouse, the blue-grey mouse and the Percy Island flying fox. “It is important to acknowledge that the losses have occurred and it’s a reminder that if we don’t manage our threatened species then extinction is the end result,” he said. He said it was a reminder that extinction was a “likely event” after a species was listed as threatened if not enough was done to save it. Prof John Woinarski, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University who helped record the plight of many of the newly listed extinct species in two books, said the listings were “humbling and sobering”. She said Haiti was next on the IUCN list for mammal extinctions with a total of nine. The Wilderness Society’s Suzanne Milthorpe said there was “not another country, rich or poor, that has anything like this record” in mammal extinction. The updated list means more than 10% of the 320 land mammals known to have lived in Australia in 1788 are extinct. ![]() The now extinct Christmas Island pipistrelle.
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