Extinction

Extinction is the termination of a species via the death of its last member. A taxon may become functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to reproduce and recover. As 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 "reappears" after a period of apparent absence.

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Source: Wikipedia · Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

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Every species, image, fact, and figure is drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, used under public-domain and Creative Commons licenses. No content is AI-generated.