Asian vultures will be extinct in the wild within a decade without urgent action to eliminate the livestock drug that has caused their catastrophic decline, a newly published paper warns.

The new study shows that the population of White-rumped Vultures Gyps bengalensis is dropping by more than 40 per cent each year in India where it has plunged by 99.9 per cent since 1992. Numbers of Indian G. indicus and Slender-billed Vultures G. tenuirostris together, have fallen by almost 97 per cent in the same period.

The natural world holds secrets to the development of new kinds of safer and more powerful pain-killers; treatments for a leading cause of blindness – macular degeneration – and possibly ways of re-growing lost tissues and organs by, for example, studying newts and salamanders.

But the experts warn that we may lose many of the land and marine-based life forms of economic and medical interest before we can learn their secrets, or, in some cases, before we know they exist.

The new book, ‘Sustaining Life’, is the most comprehensive treatment of this subject to date and fills a major gap in the arguments made to conserve nature.

May 19 will see the release of the 2008 IUCN Red List for birds. Occurring every four years, this full update is a global assessment of every bird species on earth: a complete inventory of the conservation status of the world’s avifauna.

For birds, the Red List is maintained by BirdLife International for IUCN, and with one in eight of the world’s 10,000 species at risk of extinction, compiling an accurate and fully documented list is time consuming but vital for planning conservation action.

Dr. Galen Rathbun, Chair of the IUCN/SSC Afrotheria Specialist Group, and a team of collaborators confirmed the existence of a new species, Rhynochocyon udzungwensis, a type of giant elephant shrew, or sengi, in the mountains of Tanzania.

The plight of pollinators is causing worldwide concern. Not only are populations of many formerly abundant species dwindling, some species are disappearing altogether. Although many types of pollinators have suffered, here we focus on how various species of bumblebees have gone either extinct or are close to extinction because of habitat and resource destruction, pesticide use, and pathogens.

Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken. There are now 41,415 species on the IUCN Red List and 16,306 of them are threatened with extinction, up from 16,118 last year. The total number of extinct species has reached 785 and a further 65 are only found in captivity or in cultivation.