According to a new academic study published in the online science journal PLOS ONE on Tuesday, widespread species losses have been reported in Brazil’s Atlantic forest, which was once a part of the South American continent’s great Amazon basin.

The study, carried out by Brazilian and British researchers, has highlighted that wildlife in the Atlantic forest fragments is vanishing fast; with animals which lived in the patches of rainforest – disconnected from the bigger stretch of the forest because of farms, roads or towns - dying off in far more numbers than what had been perceived earlier.

It was on the basis of their visits to 196 fragments of what once was Brazil’s big, intact Atlantic forest that the researchers concluded in the study that the rate of “local extinctions” of wildlife in the forest was “staggering.”

The researchers claimed that, on an average, each of the Atlantic forest’s isolated fragments – which ranged from less than the size of a soccer pitch to over 5,000 hectares - had only four of 18 kinds of mammals they surveyed, including howler monkeys and marmosets.

Pointing out that all the “charismatic species,” including the large primates, the large ungulates, brocket deer, tapirs, giant anteaters, jaguars, the large cats, are “pretty much gone” from the forest’s fragments, the researchers - Gustavo Canale from the State University of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and Professor Carlos Peres, of Britain's University of East Anglia – said that these species have disappeared even from fragments which appear to be “okay, in terms of forest cover.”