The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a large, flightless bird endemic to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Genetic and anatomical work has firmly established that it was a giant pigeon — its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, and its nearest relative overall was the also-extinct Rodrigues solitaire. Standing roughly a metre tall and weighing on the order of 10–18 kg (estimates vary widely), it had a heavy hooked bill, stubby useless wings, and a tuft of curled tail feathers.
Having evolved on an island with no native land predators, the dodo had no instinctive fear of humans or introduced animals — a trait early visitors misread as stupidity and that contributed to its modern reputation. It nested on the ground and laid, as far as is known, a single egg, which left its young acutely vulnerable to introduced mammals.
Dutch sailors reached Mauritius in 1598 and gave the world its first descriptions of the bird. Although sailors did hunt and eat dodos, contemporary accounts often described the meat as tough and unappealing, and direct human hunting was probably a secondary cause of extinction. The decisive damage came from the animals the Europeans brought with them and from the destruction of the island’s forests.
The last widely accepted eyewitness account dates to about 1662, when the shipwrecked Volkert Evertsz reported catching dodos on an islet off Mauritius; statistical reanalysis of the sighting record suggests the species likely persisted, undetected, until around 1690. The date of 1681, often cited as the extinction year, derives from a later traveller’s account whose reliability is debated. There was no named “endling”: the dodo slipped away within roughly a century of first contact, and no one recorded the death of the last one.
The Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii) was a saddle-backed giant tortoise endemic to Pinta, the northernmost major island of the Galápagos archipelago. Like the other Galápagos tortoise lineages it had diversified in isolation, evolving an upswept, saddle-shaped carapace that let it stretch its long neck toward the taller vegetation of an arid, low-lying island. For most of the twentieth century the form was assumed already gone, a casualty of two centuries of exploitation.
That assumption was overturned on 1 November 1971, when a single male was found on Pinta by Hungarian malacologist Jozsef Vagvolgyi, who had come to the island to collect snails. The animal was brought to the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island and given the name Lonesome George. For four decades he was the most famous tortoise in the world and the singular, living face of extinction in progress.
Despite repeated, carefully managed attempts to breed George with females from the most closely related populations, no viable offspring were ever produced. He died on 24 June 2012, estimated to be a century or more old. With his death the lineage was considered extinct, and the IUCN Red List classifies Chelonoidis abingdonii as Extinct.
George’s case became a touchstone in conservation because it compressed the whole arc of an extinction into a single, watched lifetime. The drivers were almost entirely human and entirely reversible in principle, yet by the time the last individual was found, recovery of the lineage was already biologically out of reach.
The Lord Howe Island stick insect (Dryococelus australis, Montrouzier, 1855) is a large, heavy-bodied, glossy-black flightless phasmid endemic to the Lord Howe Island group in the Tasman Sea. Adults reach roughly 12 to 15 centimeters in length and can weigh around 25 grams, with females larger than males. Its bulk and dark, hard-shelled body earned it the local names land lobster and tree lobster. For most of the twentieth century it was believed to be extinct.
The insect’s fate was sealed in 1918, when the supply ship SS Makambo ran aground at Lord Howe Island and black rats (Rattus rattus) came ashore. The rats found the large, slow, flightless phasmids easy prey, and within a few years the species had vanished from the main island. By around 1920 no living stick insects could be found, and Dryococelus australis was regarded as extinct.
Yet rumors persisted. Climbers visiting Ball’s Pyramid, a sheer volcanic sea stack roughly 23 kilometers from Lord Howe Island, had reported a dead specimen and signs that something like the lost insect might survive there. In February 2001 scientists David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile, with ranger Dean Hiscox, climbed the stack and found a tiny relict population, on the order of 24 individuals, living beneath a single Melaleuca shrub.
What followed is the family’s hopeful counterpoint, a genuine Lazarus story. A captive-breeding program begun at Melbourne Zoo in 2003, built from a handful of founders, has since reared thousands of insects. With the eradication of rats and mice from Lord Howe Island completed in 2019, the long-term goal of returning the land lobster to its home island has moved within reach.