By Susan Milius
As many as one in five species of the world’s lizards could go extinct by 2080 because they can’t take the heat of climate change, an international research team reports.
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Over the next 70 years, warming temperatures could wipe out 39 percent of local lizard populations, as well as whole species, the researchers say in the May 14 Science. In fact, some local populations have already started succumbing to heat, the team says.
Even looking only at the local losses so far, “The paper is pretty shocking,” says evolutionary biologist David B. Wake of the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t part of the research team.