OSLO, Norway -- Animals living in patches of rainforest cut off from bigger expanses of jungle by farms, roads or towns are dying off faster than previously thought, according to an academic study published Tuesday.

"We uncovered a staggering rate of local extinctions," the British and Brazilian researchers wrote in the online science journal PLOS ONE.
They visited 196 fragments of what was once a giant, intact forest in eastern Brazil on the Atlantic coast, now broken up by decades of deforestation to make way for agriculture.Each isolated forest patch, ranging from less than the size of a soccer field to more than 12,000 acres, had on average only four of 18 types of the mammals the experts surveyed, including howler monkeys and marmosets.

White-lipped peccaries, similar to pigs, "were completely wiped out and jaguars, lowland tapirs, woolly spider monkeys and giant anteaters were virtually extinct," the British and Brazilian scientists said of their findings.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2...l-forests?lite