While there have very probably have been other species that have gone extinct due to Global Warming this is the first one where the cause can be directly attributed to Global Warming, and documented.
Australian mammal: 1st to go extinct due to climate change
SYDNEY — Australian researchers say rising sea levels have wiped out a rodent that lived on a tiny outcrop in the Great Barrier Reef, in what they say is the first documented extinction of a mammal species due to man-made climate change.
The rodent was known to have lived only on Bramble Cay, a minuscule atoll in the northeast Torres Strait, between Cape York Peninsula in the Australian state of Queensland and the southern shores of Papua New Guinea. The long-tailed, whiskered creature, called the Bramble Cay melomys, is considered the only mammal endemic to the Great Barrier Reef.
“The key factor responsible for the death of the Bramble Cay melomys is almost certainly high tides and surging seawater, which has traveled inland across the island,” Luke Leung, a scientist from the University of Queenslandwho was an author of a report on the species’ apparent disappearance, said by telephone. “The seawater has destroyed the animal’s habitat and food source.”
“This is the first documented extinction of a mammal because of climate change,” he said.
Now we share our planet with one fewer species, the Bramble Cay melomy, a small mammal similar to our own distant mammalian ancestors, as a result of our own propensity to burn fossil fuels, among other things. We humans are diminishing the diversity of our planet with extinctions at an accelerating rate. We are already in the early stages of a mass extinction.