Extinction

From Paleos

Extinction is the technical term for what happens to a species when none of its members are living. It wasn't so very long ago that prominent Creationists declared it wasn't possible for any species to go extinct, because that would indicate that God had messed up somehow when He created the universe. Georges Cuvier first showed otherwise, demonstrating that mammoths are a now-extinct species of elephant, and that several other fossil species correspond to no living ones.

While extinction is usually the result of a species' chronic failure to reproduce, it should be noted that a species may also be reduced to a population of zero when, due to gradual accumulation of mutations over time, the species' current offspring can no longer be recognized as belonging to the ancestral species.

Extinction can also occur due to abiotic factors, e.g., extraterrestrial causation, volcanism, etc.

See Mass extinction