A new study has showed that world is setting for its sixth mass extinction with animals vanishing at a rate 100 times faster than they previously did. The study has also warned that humans are likely to be among the first victims of the sixth extinction event.

The dinosaurs were pushed to extinction 66 million years ago and it's the first time since then that species are being lost at such a rapid rate. The study was led by experts at Stanford University, Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley.

A paper published in the journal Science Advances on Friday has detailed the study, claiming humans to be among the species lost. Lead author Gerardo Ceballos of the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico said that it's high time to take actions to reverse the trend because if it is allowed to continue, millions of years would be required for life to recover. Moreover, human species are likely to disappear earlier than animal species.

The study was based on documented extinctions of vertebrates, or animals with internal skeletons such as frogs, reptiles and tigers, from fossil records and other historical data.

The researchers held comparisons between the current rate of species loss and natural rates of species disappearance before human activity dominated.

It's not easy for researchers to determine this rate as not much is known about what happened throughout the course of earth's 4.5 billion year history. The researchers came up with the estimate after using a past extinction rate that was twice as high as widely-used estimates.

"We emphasise that our calculations very likely underestimate the severity of the extinction crisis because our aim was to place a realistic lower bound on humanity's impact on biodiversity", said Ceballos.