Cool Animals That Are Now Extinct

The world and its oceans are filled with numerous amazing creatures despite the ever expanding quality of humanity. Creatures that would be considered something in a fantasy story or discovered by a satellite probe on a distant planet light years away can actually be found on our own Earth. Jim Cameron’s Avatar featured the planet Pandora with countless creatures that glowed in the dark, but Earth’s deep oceans have had these animals for ages! What about amazing animals of our planet that we know existed in the past either through the fossil record or actual personal accounts before the creature died off? We all know about dinosaurs, but they really are just the tip of the animal iceberg in the history of our planet.

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What list of extinct animals would be complete without the story of the dodo? It has been the textbook example of extinction as it was not even known to Western civilization until 1598 when a group of Portuguese sailors landed on the island of Mauritius and first met this nearly fifty pound flightless bird. The Portuguese named the bird after a slang term for simpleton (that still translates in English today for a dull witted person) because of its gullible lack of fear of humans. The birds on this particular island had no real reason to fear man, but after a few years it knew better. Dodos were killed off by human visitors and then had to compete with the new introduction of dogs and pigs who loved to eat the eggs of the dodo. By 1681, the last known dodo was killed after less than one hundred years of being known by Western explorers.

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While the scientific name for this creature is Smilodon (pronounced smile-o-don) most people know him as the saber-tooth tiger, even though he is not a tiger. It is easy to see why the scientific community would name him Smilodon though. His huge sword like teeth always put a permanent grin on this feline’s carnivorous mouth. They were among the largest felines to ever live. A full grown Smilodon could weight between 120 to 1,100 pounds. The Smilodon populator who reigned in South America had an average adult weight of 1,000 pounds and was muscularly built more like a bear than a cat. This species of ferocious cat roamed all over both North and South America until about 10,000 years ago when he went extinct through a combination of his food sources dying out and the slow migration of humans into his territory.

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The quagga is a subspecies of zebra that ruled the drier plains of South Africa until its extinction in the late 1870s. During its first discovery in the late 1770s, many people thought it was a species in itself. However, the extensive explorations of Africa and the multiple variations of zebras that popped up from those explorations over the beginning part of the 1800s made people think that maybe they were confused about which were actual species and which were just variations. This was a particular problem with zebras as each one has totally unique stripping, and the fact that quaggas look like small horses on their lower half and stripped zebras on the top half exacerbates the problem. While naturalists of the 19th century were trying to sort out this issue, quaggas were hunted to extinction for their hides, as a human food source, and (especially important for the African plains) were killed off to save grass sources for other species, particularly horses.