• Question: What is the animal closest to extinction at the moment?

    Asked by Sammy to Miranda on 7 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Miranda Bane

      Miranda Bane answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      Hi Sammy,
      Thats a really difficult question. There are so many animals that are facing extinction and we are not able to monitor them all so we cant say which will be the next to go extinct. There are even species that we haven’t yet discovered that might be about to go extinct, particularly those that live in the oceans and the amazon rainforest.
      The IUCN red list which collects information about endangered animals has just under 24,000 species classed as threatened in 2016. This will only be a small proportion of the total number because they have only collected data on a small proportion of species.

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