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"Popular" Recently Extinct Animals besides the Dodo >> January C 2007

I was reading American Colonies by Alan Taylor which briefly mentioned Steller's sea cow towards the end of the book and I got to thinking about other interesting animals that were killed off by human hunters.

1) Steller's Sea Cow - Imagine a giant white manatee more than 25 feet long (twice as long as a Florida Manatee). Steller's sea cow was first "officially" discovered in 1741 in the Bering Sea by Georg Wilhelm Steller (via Vitus Bering's expedition) and was hunted to extinction around 1768. That was quick. I say "officially" because I expect the local Aleutians and others who lived around to the Bering Sea probably had seen quite a few before, and likely had their share of blubber sandwiches. Though when you're starving to death everything tastes delicious I'm sure. According to sources listed below, there were less than ~2,000 left by the time Steller and boatloads of starving Russian fur hunters arrived in the vicinity. The locals probably had a cooler name for the beast than Steller's sea cow. For more fascinating info and pictures (and less jibber jabber) check out the links below. For example, learn about the endangered Dugongs (Dugong dugon) which belong to the same order Sirenia. And of course: We must protect de manateeeee!

2) Tasmanian Tiger - ...Not to be confused with the Tasmanian Devil which could easily also face extinction and is the closest surviving relative. Other names for the Tazzy Tiger include Tazmanian wolf and Thylacine. It was the largest known carnivorous marsupial of modern times (past 10k years). It looked like a large dog with stripes on the back. However it was able to hop somewhat like a kangaroo and had a pouch to keep babies cozy like other marsupials. The Tasmanian Tigers died off on mainland Australia around 2000 years ago, leaving the last of the bunch on the island of Tasmania. But these too were soon was killed off by surly farmers who loved sheep more than thylacines. A farmer named Wilf Batty supposedly shot the last wild one in 1930. Competition from wild dogs and loss of habitat also affected the rapid decline. The last captive Thylacine died in 1936 and was apparently very poorly cared for in a crummy zoo. There have since been rumors and unconfirmed sightings and million dollar rewards posted for the live capture of a tazzy tiger but to no avail.

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3) Giant Moa - There were many varieties of Moa (all extinct now). Similar relatives are possibly the emu and kiwi. The giant moa was one of the biggest birds in the world (7 feet to middle of back, 13 feet if neck stretched tall), like an ostrich except even scarier and meaner and bigger. The big birds, called Poua-Kai by the locals, roamed New Zealand until about 1773, when it was hunted to extinction. Europeans didn't know about it until the 1830's when bones were discovered. They had no wing, not even vestigial, but according to Maori legend "destroyed half the warriors of a powerful tribe with its terrible rending talons and thrusting beak". There were many similar large ratites, top-of-the-food-chain-until-humans-arrived birds, all over the world including the Elephant Bird of Madagascar which weighed even more than the Giant Moa but died off by 1649. Europeans who began arriving around the 1500s managed to nab some 13" eggs before the last ones croaked. There were also varieties of Tazmanian Emus (extinct by 1850) which were likely killed off by bush fires started by man and by hunting.

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4) Passenger Pigeon - By the time Europeans arrived in North America there were estimated to be around five billion passenger pigeons. Their migratory flocks were a mile wide and 300 miles long. Then they were slaughtered by humans in a few centuries. They were killed en mase, by smoking them out of their nests and lulling them with alcohol-soaked grain. Martha was the last survivor and died in 1914 in a Cincinnati zoo. A passenger pigeon looked similar to a large mourning dove.

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5) Arc Form Pearly Mussel or Epioblasma arcaeformis - I chose this one because it's not popular at all. It can be a representative for all the ignored species that have gone extinct. The ones that aren't quite so cool, but are still gone from this world. I also chose this one because it was killed by pollution and damming rivers, a sign that humans kill in many more ways than just hunting. Maybe that's obvious by now though. They probably went extinct around 1940. These sugarspoons lived around Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Next time you watch Deliverance with friends you can be a smartypants and mention something about mussels like these getting killed due to the damming. Though Deliverance was set in Georgia in the 70s I think, but some other kind of mussels probably got wasted then too.

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