Random Extinct Animal Generator

What the extinct animal generator does

You want an animal that is not here any more. For a project, a story, a quiz, or because you got curious at midnight about what a Quagga was.

This gives you one. Some you will know. The dodo is always going to be the dodo. Most of them you will not, and that is the interesting half.

What follows is the thing that changed how I read a list like this. The most spectacular extinction on it happened to the most numerous bird that has ever existed, and it took about fifty years.

One thing worth knowing up front: not everything here is extinct in the same way. Some, like the dodo, are gone completely. A few are technically extinct in the wild, surviving now only in captivity or reintroduction programmes. And one or two lived in deep prehistory, long before the recent losses. They sit together as animals you can no longer meet in the wild, but the differences between those states are real.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One for a subject. Ten to find out how few you recognise.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

Being common does not save you

Start with the passenger pigeon, because it breaks the thing you assume.

You assume rarity is the danger. Small population, narrow range, one island, one valley. That is what an endangered animal looks like, and it is why the dodo makes sense to us. One island, no fear of people, gone.

The passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird in the world. The estimate for the 1800s is three to five billion of them. Billion. Roughly one in every four birds in North America was a passenger pigeon. Flocks took days to pass overhead. People described the sky going dark at noon, and branches snapping off oaks under the weight of roosting birds.

The last one died in 1914.

From a quarter of all birds on a continent to zero, in about the span of one human career. There is nothing else like it in the record, and for a century the explanation was simply that we shot them, which we absolutely did, industrially, by the trainload, with telegraph lines used to report where the flocks were.

But that never fully added up, and here is the good part. In 2014 a team led by Chih-Ming Hung took DNA from the toe pads of three museum specimens and reconstructed the population history going back a million years.

The billions were a spike.

The genetics say this was never a steadily enormous species. It was a boom and bust bird, swinging violently up and down over centuries, because it lived on tree mast, on acorns and beechnuts, and mast is wildly unreliable. Some years the forest floods with it. Some years there is nothing. So the pigeon rode that, exploding when the food came and crashing when it did not.

Which means two things at once. The billions people saw in the 1800s were a peak, not a normal. And a species built for enormous swings is a species that is only ever safe at the top of one.

We arrived, with guns and telegraph and railways, at the top of a swing. And a bird that could not breed except in colossal colonies found that below a certain number it simply could not go on. It did not decline gently to zero. It fell off the edge of its own biology.

The paper's own framing is the line worth keeping. This runs against the conventional wisdom that an enormous population is a buffer against extinction. It is not a buffer. Sometimes it is the thing that hides how close to the edge you already are.

Look back at your batch now. Every name on it looked permanent to somebody.

The last one had a name

Take the pigeon all the way down to one animal.

Her name was Martha. She lived at the Cincinnati Zoo and she was the last passenger pigeon alive on the planet. Not the last wild one. The last one.

For four years she was completely alone in her species. The zoo had offered a reward for a mate. Nobody could produce one, because there were none. She had been born in captivity and had never seen a flock, so this bird, whose entire biology was built around being inside a cloud of millions of others, spent her whole life in a cage without ever meeting another of her kind in the wild.

Visitors complained she did not move enough. People threw sand at her to make her do something.

She died on the 1st of September 1914, at about one in the afternoon. They froze her in a three hundred pound block of ice and sent her to the Smithsonian, where she still is.

So there is a date. That is the strange part. Species almost never get a date. They fade out somewhere unwatched and we work it out decades later from the absence. This one has a time of death, an address, and a name, because it happened in a cage in Ohio in front of people.

Every other name on this list also ended with one last individual. We just were not there for most of them.

How anyone decides a thing is gone

Proving something exists is easy. Find one. Proving nothing exists anywhere is not the same kind of job.

So the bar is deliberately high and deliberately slow. A species is only declared extinct after exhaustive surveys, across everywhere it is known to have lived, at the right times of year, over enough years that finding nothing means something. Until then it sits in a holding category, and some species have sat there for decades.

The reason for the caution has a name. Lazarus taxa. Things that come back.

The coelacanth is the famous one. A lobe finned fish known only as fossils, understood to have died out something like sixty six million years ago, and studied purely as a thing that used to be. Then in 1938 a museum curator called Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer went down to look at a trawler's catch in South Africa and found one on the deck. Alive when it came up. It had been there the whole time. Local fishermen had been catching them for generations and nobody had thought to mention it to a scientist.

It has kept happening. The Lord Howe Island stick insect was declared gone in the 1920s and turned up in 2001 on a rock stack in the sea, twenty three animals living under one shrub.

Which is why some names on this list carry an asterisk in the literature. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is on here, and the argument about it has been running for decades, with declarations, retractions, blurry footage and furious ornithologists. Eastern Cougar is contested for different reasons.

That uncertainty is not sloppiness. Declaring a species extinct removes its legal protection and stops the money. Getting it wrong in that direction can finish off something that was still hanging on. So the list moves slowly at the end on purpose, because the cost of being early is worse than the cost of being late.

Where these come from

The animals here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is drawn out of it at random.

That is the whole thing, and it runs on your own device.

Bringing them back, and what that would even mean

You cannot read this list without the question turning up. Could we?

Partly, sort of, and not in the way the word suggests.

What is actually on the table is not resurrection. There is no passenger pigeon genome sitting in a freezer waiting for a spark. What is on the table is taking a living relative, a band-tailed pigeon or an Asian elephant, and editing its genome until the animal that results looks and behaves like the thing you lost. The result is not the extinct animal. It is a living animal wearing some of its features.

Which is a real achievement and it is also a different sentence from the one on the press release.

The Pyrenean Ibex is on this list and it is the case that actually happened. The last one died in 2000, crushed by a falling tree. Tissue had been kept. In 2003 a cloned kid was born, and for about seven minutes the species was un-extinct. Then it died of a lung defect. That is the only time a species has ever come back, and it lasted less than a coffee break.

And then the deeper problem, which the passenger pigeon shows better than anything. Suppose you built one. What would you do with it?

The bird needed billions of itself. It needed flocks that broke branches, mast forests that no longer exist at that scale, and a continent that has been comprehensively rearranged. A passenger pigeon on its own is not a passenger pigeon. It is Martha. We have already made one of those and it was not a happy outcome.

The animal was never the only thing that went extinct. The conditions went too, and those are much harder to edit.

Questions people ask

Was the dodo actually stupid?

No, and it is the most persistent slander in zoology. The dodo evolved on Mauritius with no land predators at all, so it had no reason to be afraid of anything, and being unafraid of a sailor is not the same as being stupid. It also was not fat or clumsy. Most of the images everyone knows were painted in Europe from overfed captives or from other people's paintings, by artists who had never seen a live one. The real bird was leaner and it was a giant pigeon, which puts it on this list twice over in a way.

Why is Megalodon on here with the dodo?

Because the word extinct covers a wildly uneven amount of time. Megalodon has been gone for something like three and a half million years and nobody had anything to do with it. The dodo went in the 1600s and people did. The list holds both because both answer to the word, but they are barely the same subject. Roughly speaking, if a species disappeared without a person involved, it is palaeontology. If a person was involved, it is history, and it is much more recent than people expect.

Is the Tasmanian Tiger really gone?

Officially yes. The last confirmed one died in a Hobart zoo in 1936 and the species was declared extinct in 1982. Unofficially, Tasmania generates sightings every single year and has done for ninety years, and none has ever produced anything. It is the best example of a thing this list does to people. A species that disappeared within living memory, on film, with people who remember it, is very hard to accept as finished, and the wanting does not fade for generations.

How many species have gone extinct?

Almost all of them. More than ninety nine percent of everything that has ever lived is extinct, and that has been true for a very long time. The number people actually mean when they ask is how many went recently and because of us, and that number is much smaller, much less certain, and much more upsetting. Most of it is species nobody named before they were gone.

Can I use this for a school project?

That is a lot of why it is here. Pull one you have never heard of and you have a better project than the dodo already, because you will have to find real sources. Start with the year it was last seen and the place. Those two facts open everything else, and they are usually more specific and more recent than anyone guesses.

References

1. Hung, C.-M., Shaner, P.-J. L., Zink, R. M., Liu, W.-C., Chu, T.-C., Huang, W.-S. and Li, S.-H. (2014). Drastic population fluctuations explain the rapid extinction of the passenger pigeon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(29), 10636 to 10641. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1401526111
2. Folch, J. et al. (2009). First birth of an animal from an extinct subspecies (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) by cloning. Theriogenology, 71(6), 1026 to 1034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.theriogenology.2008.11.005
3. IUCN. Red List Categories and Criteria. https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/categories-and-criteria
4. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon. https://www.si.edu/spotlight/passenger-pigeon