Submitted by salt-the-skies t3_zq4tw7 in askscience
With the forces of evolution being constant, steady and spread over time are there examples of animals distinctly losing the 'arms race' and being wiped out by pure predation?
I'm asking in a way that excludes human interference (introducing invasive species, habitat destruction) or general changes (climate change, human caused or otherwise, meteor strikes, etc).
Or would any natural history of this be too nuanced/unclear for us to make an educated inference that something happened just because of predation and not multiple factors?
Most_Engineering_992 t1_j0y0qkw wrote
Passenger Pigeons. Dodos. Both made extinct via predation. The fact that it was hman predation shouldn't matter much, but if you really want to only consider non-humans then rats and cats and pigs have made dozens of species extinct.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1602480113