“The more recent, historic waves of extinctions of megafauna and other ecologically naive wildlife on oceanic islands followed the tract of colonizations by Pacific Islanders—ultimately exterminating at least seventeen of Madagascar’s largest lemurs and all of the ten or so species of New Zealand’s giant flightless birds—the moas. The saga of anthropogenic extinctions was repeated countless times across the marine realm as hundreds, and possibly thousands of species of flightless birds and other insular endemics suffered extinctions at the hands, teeth, and claws of our colonizing populations and the legion of rats, mice, cats, weasels, goats, and other species we introduced to even the most remote islands. Not only did we severely reduce the distinctiveness of oceanic islands by driving thousands of endemic species to extinction, but we compounded this by introducing a redundant suite of commensal species to these islands. The result was a global-scale homogenization of nature; a dissolution of biogeography’s most fundamental pattern, Buffon’s Law—the biological distinctiveness of place.” ExtinctionBiogeographyBuffon S Law Book:Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction Source: Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction