Elephant Bird (Aepyornis)

     Elephant birds were among the heaviest birds that have ever existed. Following the extinction of the last dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the mighty reptiles that had dominated the earth for more than 160 million years, the long overshadowed birds and mammals evolved into a great variety of new species, some of which gave rise to giants like the elephant bird. In their general appearance, elephant birds were similar to the fiightless birds called “ratites” with which...

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Warrah (Dusicyon australis)

   Remote and treeless, the Falkland Islands is a small archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean. Ravaged by incessant winds and terrible winter storms, these islands are a very harsh environment. Although the Falklands are a welcome refuge for marine animals such as penguins, seals, and sea lions, very few land animals have managed to make a living on this stark, oceanic outpost. The only mammals known from the Falkland Islands are a small species of mouse and a mysterious dog, the warrah,...

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Tarpan (Equus ferus)

  It may come as a surprise, but the domestication of the horse stands out as one of the most signifi  cant moments in human history. This seemingly insignifi  cant event changed the way we lived forever. It enabled our ancestors to travel quickly over huge distances, and they harnessed the strength and tenacity of these animals to do tasks that previously required several men. Also, when the useful life of the horse was over, its flesh provided sustenance and its skin, bones,...

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Stephens Island Wren (Xenicus lyalli)

 Rising to heights of around 300 m, Stephens Island looms off   the northernmost tip of Marlborough Sound on South Island of New Zealand. The island is tiny (2.6 km2), but it is a refuge for many animals that have disappeared from the mainland since the arrival of Polynesians. On this prominent lump of rock, there once lived a small bird known as the Stephens Island wren. This bird was unrelated to the familiar wrens of the Northern Hemisphere and actually belonged to a small group of...

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Quelili (Caracara lutosa)

  Two hundred and forty miles off the northwest coast of Mexico lies the island of Guadalupe, a small volcanic island, 35 km long and about 9 km at its widest point. Even though it is barely a speck in the vastness of the Pacifi  c Ocean, Guadalupe was once home to a number of animals that were found nowhere else. One of the most famous Guadalupe residents was the quelili. This bird of prey was very closely related to the caracaras of Central and South America, and perhaps the ancestors...

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Pig-Footed Bandicoot (Chaeropus ecaudatus)

    Australia was once home to a unique collection of beasts, including giant marsupials and fearsome reptiles. However, scurrying around the big feet of this megafauna were a huge number of small marsupials that evolved to fill most of the ecological niches occupied by placental mammals in other parts of the world. There were rabbitlike marsupials, tiny mouselike animals, even a marsupial equivalent of a mole, to name but a few. Some of these animals can still be found today, but...

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Rocky Mountain Locust (Melanoplus spretus)

In the late nineteenth century, much of the United States was a frontier where people sought to realize their American dream, and many of them headed to the vast prairies of this continent. The term prairie conjures up images of beautiful, undulating plains stretching as far as the eye can see, yet this image is not altogether accurate. In the winter, these plains get bitterly cold, and in the summer, they are blistering hot. Add to this an almost perpetual wind, and what you get is an unforgiving...

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Eskimo Curlew ( Numenius borealis)

The story of the Eskimo curlew is a sad tale of greed and senseless waste and a perfect example of how destructive our species can be. The Eskimo curlew was a small wading bird, no more than 30 cm long, with an elegant, 5-cm-long beak. Like the other curlew species, the Eskimo curlew had a distinctive, beautiful call, and the Inuit name for this bird,  pi-pi-pi-uk,  is an imitation of the sound they made on the wing and on the ground.  The Eskimo curlew may have been a small bird,...

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Gastric Brooding Frog (Rheobatrachus silus)

Another victim of the amphibian disaster was a fascinating little frog from Australia that was only discovered in 1973, yet by 1981, it had vanished without a trace.  The gastric-brooding frog was a small species; females were around 5 cm long, while males were smaller, at approximately 4 cm. It lived in forest streams and rocky pools, and for much of the time, it would hide beneath rocks on the bed of these water bodies, but when it left these rocky refuges and moved out into the fast-?owing...

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