Extinction motors
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A physically stronger and more adaptable species can, of course, push another species out of its preferred ecosystem. This has probably happened more often than we realise in the past since competition plays an important role in life, but this is more likely to have been a re-division of territory rather pushing them into extinction. Many species which live in family groups break into smaller units after a certain optimum size is reached and often young males are expelled to start their own families. The only restraint would seem to be the availability of suitable habitat.
Invasive species, in which humans must be included, who are not naturally indigenous to an ecosystem pose a much greater threat. Tectonic plate movements have brought entire ecosystems with them which have resulted in faunal mixes and, presumably, caused extinctions. However, these changes would have been fairly gradual as the land masses moved slowly closer to each other. A clear division of faunal difference can be seen in the Philippines and Indonesia where the Australian plate meets the Eurasian plate. First identified by Alfred Wallace, whose fieldwork prompted Darwin to publish his own theory of evolution, in his book published in 1876, the Wallace Line separating the two plates is clearly visible when you examine the ocean shelf contours with Google Earth. Over the millennia an overlap has occurred, but this tends not to include non-flying animals and some predatory species found on the Eurasian plate never reached the Australian plate.

Humans are probably responsible for more extinctions in the last five hundred years through the species which travelled with them to island ecosystems than through their own history of directly exterminating species. Rats, cats, dogs, goats, sheep, pigs, horses, rabbits, squirrels, snakes and toads, not to mention a cornucopia of plants, unwittingly or deliberately introduced into ecosystems have often wreaked havoc. This is an on-going tragedy in many places of the world and will undoubtedly continue, resulting in more indigenous species becoming extinct. A list of invasive species according to region can be found here.
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