A Bestiary of loss

Once widespread in Asia, Europe, and North Africa, the aurochs is believed to be a wild ancestor of domestic cattle. One of the largest herbivores in the Holocene, their grazing of nuts, twigs, and grass shaped historical ecosystems, and their manure supported vast kingdoms of insects and fungi. A prominent participant in human history --- and one of the richest food sources before the advent of agriculture --- aurochs were among the earliest figures to appear in Paleo- and Neolithic cave paintings and petroglyphs, and feature across Egyptian reliefs, Bronze Age figurines, and classical literature.

The stories collected are informed by Wikipedia’s list of recently extinct animals, Julian P. Hume’s profoundly detailed Extinct Birds, and many other linked resources.

Famously flightless and fearless of humans, the dodo was endemic to Mauritius, evolutionarily forgoing flight due to the richness of abundant food sources and lack of immediate predators. Little remains known about their behavior or appearance (accounting for the varied depiction in naturalist illustrations) due to the narrow research window between their first recorded description, by Dutch sailors in 1598, and last accepted sighting in 1662. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where, with perhaps tragic irony, the dodo declares that the best thing to help the animals would be "a Caucus-race".s

Once ranging across the North Pacific during the Pleistocene epoch, by the eighteenth century, this sirenian mammal was found only around the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. Its first recorded encounter with humans occurred in 1741, when the German botanist and explorer George Wilhelm Steller shipwrecked on Bering Island and spent a year researching wildlife while awaiting rescue, which explains how he came to describe the animal's taste as reminiscent of corned beef.

The bluebuck was a species of antelope found in South Africa until the early 1800s. With a lesser mane than roan and sable antelopes, its name derives from a distinct gray-blue coat. When European colonists encountered the animal during the seventeenth century, it was already in decline, due perhaps to a changing grassland habitat around the Cape Peninsula. Hunted to extinction by settlers within a century, biologists did not have long to observe the creature's behavior before it vanished

Comparable in size to modern Galapagos giant tortoises, this animal was endemic to Réunion, where its vast creeps were important for maintaining the biodiversity of forests. Noted to be friendly, curious, and without fear, its populations were exploited by passing sailors in need of oil and food, further shrinking when settlers from France and Madagascar began to occupy the island in the seventeenth century. Like its fellow Mascarene giant tortoise species, the animal's slow metabolism allowed it to survive without food or water for extended periods, making it perversely suited for being packed into ship holds.

Historically plentiful in South Africa, southern Namibia, and possibly also Lesotho and Botswana, this species of black rhinoceros went extinct around 1850 due to hunting and habitat destruction. Very little is known about the animal.

Endemic to Tahiti, the black-fronted parakeet was discovered by Europeans during James Cook's first voyage in 1769 --- when the specimens held in Liverpool and at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring may have been collected.

Once populating Réunion, this species of starling is thought to have been first recorded by Étienne de Flacourt of the French East India Company in 1658. It was noted to be delicious by Sieur Dubois in 1674, especially "when it is fat" --- a reference to the bird's summer feeding cycles. As a twentieth-century natural historian elaborated somewhat caustically: "It

Classed as a flightless alcid, and the only modern species of the genus Pinguinus, this creature gave its name to penguins, as Atlantic sailors believed the latter birds were related to the auk. Historically ranging between eastern North America, Scandinavia, and the Strait of Gibraltar, the great auk mated for life, weighed about five kilograms (eleven pounds), and gurgled when anxious. Human history is tightly entwined with the bird.

We barely knew the warrah", begins a recent National Geographic feature on the Falklands Islands wolf. It was first sighted by Captain John Strong in 1690, studied by Charles Darwin in 1833, and then, forty years later, was nevermore.

Named for an onomatopoeic Khoikhoi word for zebra --- thought to mimic the creature's equine call --- the quagga was endemic to South Africa until it was hunted to extinction by European settlers in the late nineteenth century. Brown and white striped, it was known to roam in herds of fifty.

Half the length of its Pyrenean relative, there remains some debate whether or not the Portuguese ibex was a subspecies or a species of its own.

A species of ray-finned fish found only in the United States, the harelip sucker has not been seen since 1893. Once considered by fishermen in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee as "the commonest and most valued species of sucker", it had an olive-colored back, a nonprotractile upper lip, and a notably short head.

Once endemic to the San Francisco Bay Area --- specifically Alameda Creek, Coyote Creek, and Steamboat Slough --- the sooty crayfish was declared extinct in 2010.

This species of grasshopper was an infamous decimator of prairie farms in the 1870s. One swarm, recorded in 1875 and named after the observing physician Albert Child, was calculated to number between 3.5 and 12.5 trillion insects, encompassing some 198,000 square miles (510,000 square kilometers) of land. A western Missouri historical record remembers how they gave "an earnest and overwhelming visitation, and demonstrated with an amazing rapidity that their appetite was voracious, and that everything green belong to them for their sustenance.

Once endemic to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, the bulldog rat was russet colored, dwelling on hills and in thick forests. The creatures' demeanor has been described as sluggish --- avoiding daylight, for it dazed them, and never climbing into trees or shrubs.

Known as the hoa on its Hawaiian island of Molokai --- with a fossil record also found on the neighboring Maui --- the black mamo was known for its highly decurved bill, often dusted with pollen from lobelia flowers. Killed off by habitat destruction and the introduction of rats and mosquito-borne diseases, the last recorded specimens were captured in 1907, only fourteen years after its first recording by European naturalists. Its Latin name funereal, the same root from which we derive the word "funeral", tragically hints toward its doomed future.

Named after Sir Hans Sloane, whose private collection helped found the British Museum, this species of moth was endemic in Jamaica until the last reported sighting around 1895. Its neon green, red, and blue coloration was achieved by refracting light off of ribbon-like scales, a warning to predators of its toxicity. The diurnal species lived a migratory existence, known for suddenly vanishing from areas it had previously called home.

A species of small, free-ranging horse from the Russian steppe, it is uncertain whether tarpans were wild or feral creatures, hence their ferus taxonomy. They were first described by the German botanist Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin in 1771 and the last tarpan is thought to have died in captivity in 1909.

This wild North American pigeon was named not for its ability to transport passengers, but for its wanderlust tendency to pass by (passager, in the French), before gradually passing out of existence for good, due to hunting and widespread deforestation in the nineteenth century. Living in the deciduous groves of eastern North America and breeding around the Great Lakes, the passenger pigeon's population at one point numbered between three and five billion. (A similar number range occurs in the dating of its oldest known fossil: from a specimen found in North Carolina estimated to be between 3.6 to 5.3 million years old.) It could reach airborne speeds of sixty-two miles (one hundred kilometers) per hour and caught light in its iridescent neck feathers. Wallace Craig attempted to record a different kind of tonal richness: the male pigeon's vibrant vocalizations, in musical notation and phonetic imitation, as it moved gently toward its mate: "kee-kee-kee-kee", "tete! tete! tete!" This chattering call sounded from one of the most social land birds, whose scale of loss is almost inconceivable: at their peak, passenger pigeon populations were about equal in number to all the birds that currently overwinter in North America.

The Carolina parakeet shares a bleak historical affinity with the passenger pigeon: the species were known to flock together, and four years after the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, Incas --- the final captive Carolina parakeet --- died in the same cage. This small green bird, with a lemon-yellow head and ruddy face, was the only indigenous parrot to the eastern Midwest and plains states, and one of only three parrots native to the United States. It was first recorded by the English merchant venturer George Peckham in his A True Report of the Late Discoveries of the Newfound Lands (1588).

Once roaming throughout the lower southeast of the United States, the Florida black wolf hunted bison in prairies and pine forests. While initially thought to be a type of coyote, scientific consensus now believes that the animal was a subspecies of red wolf.

Reportedly common on the Big Island in 1891 and 1892, this yellow-tufted bee-eater had disappeared two years later, which contemporary observers believed resulted from prize hunting and from forest lands being cleared for coffee plantations and browsing livestock. The last specimen was collected in 1902, although a senior Hawaiian ornithologist swears to have heard one hidden amid the flanks of the active volcano Mauna Loa in 1934. Notably timid, the nectivorous ʻōʻō had an extended tongue for probing lobelias and made a hummingbird-like buzzing while hovering.

The darkly-striped thylacine wa s a marsupial, not a tiger, and had many canine characteristics. Formerly it lived on New Guinea and the Australian mainland, but met its end on Tasmania, with the last captive specimen outside of Oceania dying in 1931. Its tigrine features are present in rock art dating back to at least 1000 BCE.

Slim, graceful, and elegant, this species of wallaby once roamed in Victoria and South Australia. Sociable, they lived in groups, finding homes in swampy areas and foraging sedgeland by twilight. Hunted for their ash-brown pelt, the toolache wallaby population was culled by the introduction of European animal predators to Australia, and further decimated when their habitats were cleared by selectors for agricultural purposes. A final 1920s attempt to save the wallaby ended in disaster when fourteen were accidentally killed by conservationists. The last recorded observation of the wallaby in the wild was in 1924, although there were hopeful --- although unconfirmed --- reports of sightings during the 1970s.

One of two species of skink named for the French zoologist Gabriel Bibron, Chioninia coctei inhabited the islets of Branco and Raso in the Cape Verde archipelago. One of the largest skink species, it was unique for having tooth crowns that were labiolingually compressed and multicuspate (ridged by cusps and bumps), and notable for its transparent lower eyelid, a mechanism that possibly allowed it to better spot predators on the ground. Its extinction is thought to have been caused by hunting, the introduction of predatory animals, and its harvesting for skink oil by native residents of the nearby islands.

Ranging across the Arabian Peninsula, this ostrich species served as a sacrificial offering in Mesopotamia, adorned prehistoric lithic graffiti, and was thought be a fit gift for kings in Tang China. It was disparaged in the Old Testament's Book of Job --- which instead praised the parental stork --- for leaving its nest unattended.

Last seen surfacing near the Serranilla Bank in 1952, this monk seal is still sometimes reported by fisherman and divers in Haiti and Jamaica, yet scientific expeditions have failed to confirm the sightings. (It is suspected that the observed animals are hooded seals, not Caribbean monk seals.) While early colonial voyages encountered the species throughout the Caribbean --- Christopher Columbus and his crew slaughtered eight of these "sea wolves" for sustenance in 1494 --- its populations are thought to have been already diminished by the fifteenth century, relegated to atolls by indigenous hunting activities. Although first recorded by Europeans four hundred years before its extinction, little scientific research was ever conducted on the species.

With a soft and silky pelage limned by rufous tones, this species lived in the scrub of southwestern and central Australia until at least the 1950s. Extremely timid, the crescent nail-tail wallaby was first observed at length by John Gould in 1840, who chose the specific name lunata (lunar) to describe the animal's crescent markings.

Until the mid-twentieth century, this species of freshwater whitefish was common in the Great Lakes of North America. Spawning on stony substrate, it was distinct for its green and black coloration, which provided a form of camouflage for these denizens of the deep, who lived at depths of up to six hundred feet (180 meters).

Declared extinct in the 1970s, this sea lion once traveled the Sea of Japan, frequently seen around the Japanese Archipelago and near the Korean Peninsula. Considered a subspecies of the California sea lion until 2003, these dark gray mammals rested in caves and were harvested for oil, according to an eighteenth-century Japanese encyclopedia, and, later, were captured to serve as circus attractions.

The "functionally extinct" baiji, whose Latin taxonomic designation translates to the "flag bearer left behind", lived in China's freshwater Yangtze river system, a catchment area that the cetaceans share with approximately twelve percent of the global population. Even if a few members of the species live on, this population is no longer viable for reproduction and continued survival (a 1991 expedition recorded just thirteen baijis; a 2006 expedition adjusted that number: one or two, maybe, but most likely none).

Living in the sparse forests and riverine corridors of eastern Turkey, northern Iran, the Caucasus, and western China until the 1970s --- and, before the Middle Ages, in Ukraine and southern Russia --- this tiger's extinction is entwined with the Russian colonization of Turkestan in the late nineteenth century. It was hunted for sport; the animal's preferred reed-bed habitats were converted to cropland for cotton; and the Russian military was used to clear predators from local forests. We know little about their behavior.

Possibly extinct, this forest bird is endemic to New Zealand's South Island, notable for its black facial mask and orange wattles, the latter of which distinguish the kōkako from a North Island relative. Last sighted in 2007 --- the first authenticated observation since 1967 --- the bird's fleeting song was memorably described by Victorian colonial surveyor Charlie Douglas: "Their notes are very few, but the sweetest and most mellow toned I have ever heard a bird produce." Males were known to perform an "archangel" display and collectives of kōkako were described in the second edition of Walter Lawry Buller's A History of the Birds of New Zealand (1888) as preferring to pass through forests on foot, in groups as large as twenty, like a flock of sheep: "if the first bird should have occasion to leap over a stone or fallen tree in the line of march, every bird in the procession follows suit accordingly!" The kōkako's range was initially impacted by Polynesian forest management, further reduced by the clear-cutting practices of European settlers as well as the introduction of mammalian predators such as ship rats in the 1860s and stoats in the 1880s.

Declared extinct in 2011, this subspecies of the black rhinoceros was once widespread in the savannas of Africa, although they concentrated in Cameroon. It was distinctive for the shape of its larger horn, which had a square base, and a long distal limb. Like other rhinos, it had poor eyesight, forming symbiotic relationships with birds such as the red-billed oxpecker, who helped detect threats. The story of the western black rhinoceros' decline is "a story of greed, indifference, hope and despair", writes John R. Platt for Scientific American's Extinction Countdown blog. First came trophy hunters in the early twentieth century, then industrial agriculture, which destroyed large swaths of the animal's preferred home. And then, like the baiji, the western black rhinoceros (as well as its relatives, the southern and north-eastern black rhinoceros) were surprisingly impacted by the rise of Maoism. In a Cold War effort to promote traditional Chinese medicine over western cures, the powder of rhino horns was marketed as a panacea. Profiting off of this renewed demand, poachers arrived in Africa in record numbers, killing ninety-eight percent of black rhinoceros between 1960 and 1995. By 1997, there were estimated to be only ten endlings left, many living in isolation, making the species functionally extinct.

A subspecies of the Galápagos tortoise native to Ecuador's Pinta Island, this animal was presumed to be extinct by the mid-twentieth century due to uncontrolled hunting. The tortoise was first described by herpetologist Albert Günther in 1877, and the differences between subspecies of Galápagos tortoises --- adaptations suited to the distinctive environments of their different island homes --- helped Darwin formulate his theory of evolution. Like its relatives, the Pinta Island tortoise was known to rest for sixteen hours each day, and could reportedly survive almost six months without food or water. They provided a critical service to the local ecosystem, dispersing seeds and cycling nutrients for other animals and plants --- since their extinction, many other species on Pinta Island have suffered from the loss.

Once endemic to Christmas Island, the last known forest skink (nicknamed Gump) died in captivity in 2014. Living in leaf litter and covered by rich chocolate-colored scales, this species of skink was abundant in population as late as 1979. During the 80s and 90s, forest skink numbers plummeted by ninety-eight percent, alongside similar declines in other Christmas Island reptiles, such as the blue-tailed skink, Lister's gecko, and the coastal skink.

Declared extinct and then later revised as "possibly extinct" due to insufficient data, the smooth handfish is thought to have been once commonly found off the coast of Tasmania --- so much so that it was one of the first species noted by European colonists. Using pectoral fins to walk across the seabed, the fish were described by Zoe Kean on the Guardian's Age of Extinction channel as resembling "grumpy ageing punks, each spotting a dorsal fin over its head like a mohawk, bulging eyes and a cantankerous expression." Known primarily from a sole type specimen collected during François Péron's 1802 colonial survey of Australia, this species of handfish is thought to be the first modern marine fish to have gone extinct, falling prey to environmental changes and unsustainable scallop harvesting and trawl fishing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Native to the bottomland hardwood and temperate coniferous forests of Cuba and the Southern United States, the last universally accepted sighting of an American ivory-billed woodpecker was in 1944, while the last Cuban member of this species was spotted in 1987. Many subsequent sightings of this bird --- known to be John James Audobon's favorite species --- have been reported, leading to ongoing claims of rediscovery. Thought to be extinct due to widespread habitat destruction by logging, they once lived on larvae and wild fruits such as hickory nuts and persimmons. They were historically important to Native American groups from the Great Lakes and Great Plains regions, who used their bills for trade and ceremonial crafts.