Is it the end of a world, a new mass extinction? The Museum of Natural History of Toulouse launches an alarm call, with a very educational exhibition, on the serious threats to biodiversity due to human activity. Designed by the prestigious Natural History Museum in London and enriched by funds from the Toulouse establishment, "Extinctions, the end of a world?" stops in the Pink City from October 9 to June 28, 2020, after including London, Beijing and Porto (Portugal).
The visitor will first get acquainted with previous mass extinctions, species already stricken from the map as the famous Dodo, a species of bird of Mauritius now extinct, or more recently the Baiji, the dolphin of China, also called "Yangzi god" and probably extinct in 2006. Then it will continue, thanks to videos, testimonials of scientists and multimedia installations, with the efforts of conservation of the biodiversity and will understand how a species could survive a mass extinction, like the very resistant Luth tortoise.
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"Over the last 20 years, 400 species have disappeared and today one million are threatened"
The exhibition ends with questions about the future of Man and other species. From the dinosaurs to the great penguin, 99% of the species having lived on earth are now extinct. If extinction is a phenomenon inherent in life, it is the extent and speed of the loss of biodiversity that calls: "in the last 20 years, 400 species have disappeared and today a million are threatened", warns the director of the museum, Francis Duranthon.