Extinct Animal Hall of Fame
Sadly, these animal species didn't make the Natural Selection cut.
Dodo
Now a symbol of the need for preserving threatened species, the dodo was first spotted by Portuguese sailors on the island of Mauritius, off the coast of Africa, in the early 1500s. A large, flightless bird related to pigeons and doves, the dodo nested on the ground and, according to the Dutch, was not very tasty. However, the pigs and cats brought by the explorers apparently disagreed. The introduction of these and other non-native species, coupled with human habitat destruction, led to the dodo’s disappearance in the mid-17th century.
Giant Deer
Also known as the Irish elk because of the many specimens retrieved from Irish peat bogs, the giant deer more than lived up to its name. Standing seven feet tall with antlers that could span up to 12 feet, it roamed from Europe to Siberia during the Late Pleistocene era. Possibly surviving to as late as 500 BC, the deer may have disappeared due to climate change and early humans’ taste for giant venison.
Megatherium
Picture the three-toed sloth. Now, multiply its weight by a thousandfold and imagine our slow-moving friend standing 20 feet high. Welcome to the age of megafauna, when mammalian dominance was asserted by way of epic proportions. The megatherium, a giant ground sloth, lived in South America until about 10,000 years ago. As with many of its megafauna brethren, human hunting and climate change contributed to its extinction.
Aurochs
The ancestor of modern cattle, aurochs ranged from North Africa through Asia and Western Europe. Featured in the famous cave paintings at Lascaux, France, aurochs were much larger and more aggressive than their descendants, although humans began domesticating them nearly 8,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. The last of the wild aurochs was killed in Poland in 1627, but attempts have been made to breed back a modern version, with debatable success.
Quagga
This subspecies of the African plains zebra was famed for its strange appearance: with stripes on the upper half of its body and plain brown hindquarters, it looked to be half horse, half zebra. Once numerous in South Africa, the last living quagga died at an Amsterdam zoo in 1883. Later DNA studies—the first to be done on an extinct animal—revealed that quaggas had diverged from other plains zebras about 200,000 years ago, but did not constitute a separate species.
Plesiosaurs
Although abundant during the age of the dinosaurs, these Mesozoic creatures were actually marine reptiles not dinosaurs. Distinguished by their small heads, long necks, large midsections, and four flippers, they had few natural predators. Despite persistent rumors of the Loch Ness monster and other modern incarnations, plesiosaurs died out during the K-T extinction.
