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an already fragile environment.
    Those interlopers included mice, rats, rabbits, cats, horses, donkeys, camels, goats, pigs, water buffalo, foxes and cane toads, all, apparently, robust at adapting. The mammals are all placentals, needless to say. Does this prove the point that marsupials thrived in post-Gondwana Australia only because they had no placental competition? ‘Perhaps’ is not a very scientific word, but as an answer it will have to do. Contemporary feral destruction is, alas, not in doubt:
    The impact of introduced mammals on the Australian environment and fauna has been very great and is exceeded only by the case of New Zealand. It may reasonably be assumed, however, that each feral mammal species has by now spread into every suitable Australian habitat and that their populations are more or less stable. 5
    A stable feral population is proof positive that the ousting of some sensitive natives is complete. The long-term effect on the Australian biota of forced relocations or extinctions (the latter a growing list, headed by the thylacine) is not presently knowable, but there are sure to be adverse consequences. Sadly, the thylacine’s demise may not represent an ecological catastrophe, or even a setback. We have lived without it. Yet if its passing means so little—and general indifference to threatened and endangered wildlife suggests so—the consequences for the future are truly grave.
    A single species is estimated to have a lifespan of a few million years. This is hugely variable, but is derived from painstakingly gathered data. In the course of natural events individual species die out slowly, over thousands of years, in the converse of the evolutionary process.
    Set against all of the above, and rendering them puny, are the phenomena of the mass extinctions which have governed the fate of Earthly life and are but vaguely understood. There have been about fifteen of these events, of which five are considered major, and two so gargantuan as to be named the First Event (which came at the end of the Palaeozoic era, and destroyed 90 per cent of life on the planet) and the Second Event (the extinction of the dinosaurs). Some palaeontologists and other scientists believe that the Third Event has been underway for many thousands of years—demonstrably aided and abetted by Homo sapiens sapiens .
    The Third Event involves the consequences of thousands of years of Ice Age change—in climates and sea levels—and the impact of human evolution. Eight million years ago monkeys were diversifying rapidly. Four million years ago upright hominids were dispersing across Africa. Three million years ago, the famous Ethiopian, Lucy the australopithecine, lived in a troop, her brain not much larger than a chimp’s. Two million years ago Homo habilis appeared, with a brain about halfway between that of a chimp and the future Homo sapiens sapiens . In the last 300 years, the onset of the industrial revolution, and all that has followed, has devastated the natural world, as much by its meteoric speed as by its thoroughness. Hundreds of species are dying out each day.
    Carbon dioxide emissions have created global warming out of step with nature’s processes for doing the same. The Earth’s lungs, the tropical moist forests, are themselves headed towards extinction. One does not have to be a Third Eventist to be awestruck at our capacity to destroy without replenishing.
    Meanwhile, it is no coincidence that Tasmania, the island that killed its tiger and has regretted it ever since, has much of its land mass locked away as World Heritage Area and parkland. This makes it one of the world’s most protected places. Few would dispute the role of the thylacine in making that come about, as will be discussed in a later chapter.
    The thylacine may be officially long gone, but other ‘extinct’ animals have come back and, through global agencies such as the IUCN (International Union for