HideShark list
These are species that were alive within the last ~400 years and are now gone, almost all because of humans — hunting, introduced predators, and habitat destruction. A handful are targets of "de-extinction" projects; most are simply lost.
Last one died in a Hobart zoo in 1936
A dog-shaped marsupial predator, blamed unfairly for killing sheep and destroyed by a government bounty, habitat loss, and disease. Its genome has been sequenced, and a de-extinction project is now attempting to recreate it.
Full thylacine (tasmanian tiger) guide →Extinct by around 1681
A large flightless pigeon of Mauritius, tame and ground-nesting because it evolved with no predators. Within about a century of sailors arriving, hunting and introduced pigs, rats, and monkeys wiped it out — the textbook symbol of human-caused extinction.
From billions to zero in about 50 years; last bird died 1914
Once the most numerous bird in North America, in flocks that darkened the sky for days. Industrial-scale hunting for cheap meat, shipped by rail, and the clearing of its nesting forests collapsed it with astonishing speed. The last, "Martha," died at Cincinnati Zoo.
Last pair killed in 1844
A large, flightless North Atlantic seabird — the original "penguin." Killed for meat, eggs, feathers, and fishing bait, and finally for museum specimens as it became rare. The last two known birds were strangled on an Icelandic island.
Extinct within 27 years of discovery (1768)
A 9-metre, 10-tonne relative of the manatee and dugong, found in 1741 in the Bering Sea. Slow, docile, and living in shallow water, it was hunted out for meat and blubber by fur traders in less than three decades.
Declared "functionally extinct" in 2006
A pale, nearly blind freshwater dolphin found only in the Yangtze. Dam construction, boat traffic, pollution, and entanglement in fishing gear reduced it to nothing; a 2006 survey found none, making it the first dolphin species lost to human activity.
Last one died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883
A subspecies of the plains zebra, striped only on the front half, from South Africa. Shot out for hides and to clear grazing for livestock. A breeding-back project is selectively breeding modern plains zebras toward the quagga’s appearance.
Ended with the death of "Lonesome George" in 2012
One of the Galápagos giant tortoise lineages, reduced to a single known male after goats destroyed its island’s vegetation. Decades of failed attempts to breed George with related females ended the line.
Declared extinct in 2011
A subspecies of black rhino from west-central Africa, poached out for its horn despite conservation efforts, with the last confirmed animals seen in Cameroon in the mid-2000s.
Last seen in 1989
A brilliant orange toad known only from one Costa Rican cloud forest. It vanished within a few years, an early and stark case of the global amphibian collapse linked to climate shifts and the chytrid fungus.
Well-known examples from the last few centuries include the dodo (c.1681), Steller’s sea cow (1768), the great auk (1844), the quagga (1883), the passenger pigeon (1914), the thylacine (1936), the golden toad (last seen 1989), the baiji or Yangtze river dolphin (functionally extinct by 2006), the western black rhino (2011), and the Pinta Island Galápagos tortoise (2012).
Humans, in three main ways: direct killing (hunting for meat, hides, feathers, horn, or predator control), introduced species (rats, cats, pigs, and goats brought to islands, which eat eggs, young, and vegetation), and habitat destruction (clearing forests, draining wetlands, damming rivers). Climate change and disease, both often human-linked, are growing additional drivers, especially for amphibians.
Genuine de-extinction is still hypothetical. Projects targeting the thylacine, the woolly mammoth, and the passenger pigeon aim to edit the genome of a close living relative toward the extinct species using recovered DNA. Even if a lookalike results, it would not be a true resurrection, and whether such animals could survive in the wild — or whether the effort is better spent on living endangered species — is heavily debated. "Breeding back" projects, like the one recreating the quagga’s coat from plains zebras, are a different, lower-tech idea.