EXTINCTION

Extinction

In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms, normally a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point. Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "re-appears" after a period of apparent absence.

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extinction

Noun

  1. The action of making or becoming extinct; annihilation.
  2. The absorption or scattering of electromagnetic radiation emitted by astronomical objects by intervening dust and gas before it reaches the observer.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: extinction
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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