“Humans are exterminating animal and plant species so quickly that nature’s built-in defence mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3 to 5 million years to recover.
[…]
The sixth mass extinction is happening now, but this time, the extinctions are not being caused by natural disasters; they are the work of humans.
[…]
The researchers came up with a best-case scenario of the future, where humans have stopped destroying habitats and eradicating species, reducing extinction rates to the low background levels seen in fossils. However, even with this overly optimistic scenario, it will take mammals 3-5 million years just to diversify enough to regenerate the branches of the evolutionary tree that they are expected to lose over the next 50 years.”1
[1] Mammals cannot evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis, Aarhus University, https://phys.org/news/2018-10-mammals-evolve-fast-current-extinction.amp?__twitter_impression=true, 12.09.2019