Skip to navigation | Skip to content  'Red Queen' drives mammals
to extinction  red queen  A deteriorating environment can be
like Lewis Carroll's Red Queen - if mammals don't keep up they
go extinct, say researchers (Source: Wikimedia)  Mammal
extinctions It's not bad luck that drives mammals to extinction
over geological time, but their failure to keep pace with a
deteriorating environment, researchers report.  And, they say, a
group of mammal's failure to give rise to new genera is just as
important as extinction of existing genera in determining
whether the group is likely to die out or lose diversity.
Australian palaeontologist, Professor Charles Marshall, and
colleagues, report their findings today in the journal Science.
"Change is what dominates the history of life," says Marshall,
now at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in
the US.  "In our case we looked at groups that failed to keep up
with the changes and went extinct."  Little is known about the
process by which groups of anim