50 Fun Facts About Extinct Animals

On which Indian Ocean island did the dodo live before vanishing within a century of Dutch sailors arriving?

Mauritius was the dodo's only home, and the last widely accepted sighting came in 1662, just 64 years after Dutch sailors first recorded the bird.

Which striped marsupial predator died out when its last known animal perished at a Hobart zoo in 1936?

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, won official protection just 59 days before the last known one died in captivity.

Which North American bird once flew in flocks of billions before the last one died in a zoo in 1914?

The passenger pigeon numbered three to five billion at its peak and may have been the most numerous bird on Earth. Martha, the last of her kind, died at the Cincinnati Zoo.

The Chicxulub crater, left by the asteroid blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs, lies buried in which country?

Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula hides the crater, which went unnoticed until geophysicists searching for petroleum mapped it in the late 1970s.

Which fish, thought extinct for 66 million years, was caught alive off South Africa in 1938?

The coelacanth was spotted among a local fisherman's catch by museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, and the living genus Latimeria now carries her name.

Which prehistoric ocean giant, known mostly from hand-sized fossil teeth, was the largest predatory shark ever?

Megalodon teeth can top 18 centimetres, and Roman folklore held that they were petrified tongues that fell from the sky during lunar eclipses.

Which Los Angeles fossil site trapped sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves during the last Ice Age?

The La Brea Tar Pits are still seeping: asphalt has oozed up there for tens of thousands of years, at times forming deposits thick enough to trap animals.

Which biblical figure lends his name to species rediscovered alive after being written off as extinct?

Lazarus, raised from the dead in the Gospel of John, gives the Lazarus taxon its name: a group that drops out of the record and then reappears, sometimes as living creatures.

Which Victorian children's novel features a talking Dodo who organises a Caucus-race to get everyone dry?

In Alice in Wonderland the Dodo is a caricature of Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Dodgson and whose stutter sometimes turned it into Dodo-Dodgson.

Lonesome George, who died in 2012 as the last tortoise of his kind, came from which island group?

The Galápagos island of Pinta was George's home, where a snail scientist first spotted him in 1971, and decades of attempts to mate him all failed.

Which flightless North Atlantic seabird, the first bird ever called a penguin, was hunted to extinction by 1844?

The great auk's last two confirmed birds were killed on Eldey, off Iceland, and the penguins of the Southern Hemisphere were later named for looking like it.

Which South African zebra, striped mainly on its front half, died out when the last one died in Amsterdam?

The quagga was long thought to be a separate species, but DNA studies showed it was a subspecies of the plains zebra, hunted out by the late 19th century.

Which slow-moving North Pacific sea mammal was hunted to extinction within 27 years of Europeans discovering it?

Steller's sea cow grew up to nine metres long and was too buoyant to dive fully under, which made it easy prey for hunters after its meat, fat and hide.

Which country was home to the moa, giant wingless birds wiped out within a century of human settlement?

New Zealand lost all nine moa species to overhunting, and the birds were so thoroughly wingless that they lacked even the vestigial stubs other ratites have.

The elephant bird, which laid the largest eggs of any known bird, reptile or mammal, lived on which island?

Madagascar's elephant birds died out around AD 1000, probably because of people, and their closest living relatives turn out to be the kiwi.

Which wild ox, the ancestor of modern domestic cattle, died out in a Polish forest in 1627?

The aurochs was domesticated twice, once in the Fertile Crescent and once in India, giving rise to both taurine cattle and the zebu.

Which Ice Age deer, often dug out of peat bogs, carried the largest antlers of any known deer?

The Irish elk was neither only Irish nor an elk: it ranged from Ireland to Lake Baikal, and its closest living relatives are fallow deer.

The golden toad, last seen in the Monteverde cloud forest in 1989, lived only in which country?

Costa Rica's golden toad was a poster animal for the country's biodiversity, though its whole range covered only about four square kilometres.

The baiji, a river dolphin feared extinct and once revered as a goddess by fishermen, lived in which river?

The Yangtze was the baiji's only home, and surveys there led scientists to call it the first dolphin species in history driven to extinction by humans.

Which wild goat became the first extinct animal brought back by cloning, although the newborn lived only minutes?

The Pyrenean ibex clone was born in Spain in 2003 from the last female's preserved tissue, which makes this the only animal to have gone extinct twice.

Which armoured sea creatures thrived for almost 270 million years before the worst mass extinction finished them off?

Trilobites left more than 22,000 described species behind, yet only a handful of species were still alive when the end came about 252 million years ago.

Which coiled-shelled sea creatures, closer kin to squid than to the nautilus, vanished alongside the dinosaurs?

Ammonites spread into more than 10,000 described species, and geologists still use them as index fossils to date the rock layers they turn up in.

Which geological period ended with the Great Dying, the most severe mass extinction in Earth's history?

The Permian closed with the loss of 81% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species, a blow that also ended the whole Paleozoic era.

Fossils of Titanoboa, a 13-metre snake that lived soon after the dinosaurs, came from a coal mine in which country?

Colombia's Cerrejón coal mines yielded 186 Titanoboa fossils, and the semi-aquatic giant is thought to have fed mainly on fish.

Glyptodon, an Ice Age mammal with a domed shell of bony plates, was a giant form of which animals?

Armadillos were the guess of the missionary who recorded the first glyptodont shell in Argentina in the 1750s, and he turned out to be right.

Megatherium, an elephant-sized Ice Age mammal from South America, was a ground-dwelling giant among which animals?

Sloths today hang in trees, but Megatherium weighed up to four tonnes and roamed the Pampas on the ground.

Archaeopteryx, the feathered Jurassic fossil linking dinosaurs to birds, was found in limestone in which country?

Germany's Archaeopteryx was named in 1861 from a single feather, and the animal itself still had sharp teeth, clawed fingers and a long bony tail.

Which extinct flying reptiles, often wrongly called dinosaurs, were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight?

Pterosaurs ranged from very small species to giants with wingspans of at least nine metres, the largest flying creatures known.

Which fossil hunter from Lyme Regis found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton at age twelve?

Mary Anning went on to find the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons in the same Dorset sea cliffs.

Which French naturalist, called the founding father of paleontology, established extinction as a scientific fact?

Georges Cuvier showed that elephant-like bones from North America belonged to a vanished animal he named the mastodon, when many still dismissed extinction as speculation.

Which Ice Age cat, popularly called the sabre-toothed tiger, was not closely related to tigers or any living cat?

Smilodon split from the ancestors of living cats around 20 million years ago, and its famous upper canines were slender and fragile, built for precision killing.

Gigantopithecus, a giant extinct ape known only from teeth and jawbones, is most closely allied with which living apes?

Orangutans are its nearest kin, and the first Gigantopithecus teeth came to light in a drugstore, where an anthropologist picked them out in 1935.

Paraceratherium, one of the largest land mammals ever, was a long-necked hornless relative of which living animals?

Rhinoceroses today are dwarfed by Paraceratherium, whose skull alone was about 1.3 metres long and which lived 34 to 23 million years ago.

Meganeura, an insect with a 70-centimetre wingspan that flew 300 million years ago, resembled which living insects?

Dragonflies are the closest look-alikes, but Meganeura belonged to an extinct order nicknamed griffenflies and was first dug from French coal measures in 1880.

Which geological epoch names the ongoing, human-driven extinction event sometimes called the sixth extinction?

The Holocene extinction is running at an estimated 100 to 1,000 times the natural background rate at which species are normally lost.

Which naturalist met the tame Falkland Islands wolf in the 1830s and predicted it would soon be extinct?

Charles Darwin predicted the animal would go the way of the dodo within a very few years, and settlers guarding their sheep had poisoned and hunted it out by 1876.

Which explorer's second voyage produced the first written record of the Caribbean monk seal, a species now extinct?

Christopher Columbus's men anchored off a barren islet south of Hispaniola in 1494 and killed eight of the seals resting on the beach.

Which Indonesian island east of Java lost its own population of tigers, last recorded in the late 1930s?

Bali's tigers were first described in 1912 from one skin and skull in a museum, and were told apart by their brighter fur and smaller skull.

Przewalski's horse, once extinct in the wild and locally called the takhi, is the wild horse of which country?

Mongolia's Hustai National Park is one of the places where the horses have been set free since the 1990s, living in family groups led by a single stallion.

Queensland's extinct platypus frogs were the only frogs known to raise their young in which part of the mother?

The stomach was the nursery: the female swallowed her fertilised eggs, which is why both species are better known as gastric-brooding frogs.

Which US president hoped the Lewis and Clark Expedition would find living mastodons roaming the American West?

Thomas Jefferson had already argued in his Notes on the State of Virginia that the huge beasts might still exist in the north of the continent.

Which extinct human relatives, named after a valley where bones were found in 1856, interbred with modern humans?

Neanderthals take their name from the Neander Valley, which was itself named after a 17th-century hymn writer who often visited the area.

Megalania, the largest land lizard known to have existed, may be most closely related to which living reptile?

The Komodo dragon is thought to share its way of life, though Megalania roamed Ice Age Australia and its youngest remains are about 50,000 years old.

Quetzalcoatlus, a candidate for the largest flying animal ever, takes its name from a serpent god of which people?

The Aztec sky god Quetzalcōātl supplied the name, while the species name honours Jack Northrop, a designer of tailless fixed-wing aircraft.

Basilosaurus, whose name means king lizard, was actually an early member of which group of mammals?

Whales, not reptiles: the bones were first mistaken for a giant reptile's, and later attempts to rename the animal failed because naming rules keep the original.

On which Russian Arctic island did the last woolly mammoths survive until around 4,000 years ago?

Wrangel Island sheltered an isolated herd of 500 to 1,000 mammoths for about 6,000 years after their mainland cousins vanished, into the age of Sumer and the Indus Valley cities.

Which colourful parrot died out when Incas, the last known bird, perished at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918?

The Carolina parakeet was one of only three parrot species native to the United States, and the only one found across the East, the Midwest and the Plains.

Which conservation body publishes the Red List, the global inventory of each species' risk of extinction?

The IUCN, short for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, has kept the list since 1964, and its gravest labels are extinct in the wild and extinct.

Sue, a fossil skeleton at Chicago's Field Museum that sold for a then-record $8.3 million, is which kind of dinosaur?

Tyrannosaurus Sue is more than 90% complete by bulk and is named after Sue Hendrickson, the fossil collector who spotted the bones in 1990.

Which sail-backed predator, often mistaken for a dinosaur, died out some 40 million years before dinosaurs appeared?

Dimetrodon looked reptilian but is much more closely related to mammals, belonging to the sister family of the group that produced their direct ancestor.