Researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa credit rats with having driven or assisted 103 species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals to extinction
The claim of the impending mass extinction of the Earth's species is a never-ending drama. In 1979, the biologist Norman Myers declared that a fifth of all species on the planet would be gone within two decades. Subsequently, an attempt was made to give these made-up numbers a patina of scientific respectability that was in many ways an even worse abuse of scientific logic and evidence.