Extinct and endangered animals since 1500
A tragic story Like the dodo, the Stephens Island wren or Lyall’s wren is one of the best-known symbols of human-caused extinction. Its story is often told with dramatic simplicity: a cat that arrived on Stephens Island with the lighthouse keepers discovered a previously unknown, flightless bird there—and single-handedly wiped
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Why do some animal species face a particularly high risk of extinction, while others survive even major changes to their environment? Steller’s sea cow was hunted intensively, the crescent nail-tailed wallaby was driven back by introduced foxes and cats, and the Bramble Cay melomys ultimately lost what little habitat it
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“Today the original penguin is extinct.” Robert Silverberg, 1967, p. 84 The great auk was a large, flightless seabird of the North Atlantic. Its population may once have numbered several million individuals. With its black-and-white plumage, upright posture, and short, flipper-like wings, it bore a striking resemblance to today’s penguins
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Even today, new bird species are still being discovered and described, although birds are among the comparatively well-studied animal groups. In many cases, however, these are not completely unknown animals, but species that were overlooked or misclassified for a long time. Only modern methods such as genetic analyses and bioacoustic
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There wasn’t just one elephant bird The elephant bird is probably one of the best-known of all extinct birds. Hardly any other animal so strongly embodies gigantism, enigmatic traditions, and the fascination of a world of animals that humans now know only in fragments. But the name already misleads: there
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The moa is among those extinct animals that continue to fascinate and disturb in equal measure. Not only because of its enormous size, but above all because its disappearance is comparatively recent. Just a few centuries ago, these flightless birds roamed the forests, moors, and grasslands of New Zealand. Today,
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The dodo, related to pigeons (Columbidae), is probably the best-known example of an animal species exterminated by humans. References to the bird in literature and painting are common—for example in chapter three of the children’s book Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll or in the paintings of the Flemish
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New Zealand director Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings, Braindead) is supporting an ambitious project to revive the South Island giant moa. Together with the US biotech firm Colossal Biosciences, the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, and the Canterbury Museum, the flightless bird that went extinct in the 14th or
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New Zealand, known for its unique wildlife and flora, holds many secrets from the past. One of them was revealed by a recent study in Biology Letters: the extinct upland moas (Megalapteryx didinus) were not only majestic birds, but also played a central role in dispersing colorful, truffle-like fungi such
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A study published in early October in the journal Science suggests that human-caused species loss has far-reaching consequences that were previously underestimated. The scientists highlight the fact that the extinction of bird species has not only wiped out ecological roles but also billions of years of unique evolutionary history. In
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