The Tasmanian devil has declined by 60 percent in only 10 years, ravaged by a terrible face cancer that spreads through contact.
The prestigious International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) issued a warning that more than a third of the world’s mammals could very well disappear forever.
That dire prediction accompanied an update of the “Red List,” which ranks the most threatened members of the planet’s biodiversity.
Hundreds of animals have just been added to that list, while many others have moved up the scale of endangerment to the ultimate classification of being extinct.
“In reality, the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent,” wrote IUCN scientist Jan Schipper, lead author of the mammal survey, in the journal Science.
Despite the grim outlook for some creatures, IUCN points to the success that conservation projects can have on helping some species crawl back from the brink of extinction.