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 Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), known in Spanish and Aragonese as the bucardo, was one of the subspecies of the Iberian ibex, a wild goat of the mountains of the Iberian Peninsula. It inhabited the high country of the Pyrenees in northern Spain and the far south of France, where males carried large, thick horns that curved outward, back, and up.
From the nineteenth century onward the bucardo was reduced by hunting and competition with domestic livestock until it survived only as a small remnant in and around Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park in the Spanish Pyrenees. By 1900 fewer than a hundred remained, and from 1910 the population is reported never to have risen above forty. Across the twentieth century the numbers slid steadily downward, to a handful and finally to a single animal.
That last individual, a female named Celia, was captured and radio-collared in 1999 so that biologists could monitor her. On 6 January 2000 she was found dead, crushed beneath a fallen tree. With her death the subspecies became extinct — but, unusually, her cells had been preserved.
In 2003 a team of Spanish and French scientists used those cells to clone Celia, and a cloned kid was born alive on 30 July 2003. It died within minutes from a lung defect. The bucardo thus became the first extinct animal brought back, however briefly, through cloning — and the only one to have gone extinct twice.
The baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) was a freshwater dolphin endemic to the Yangtze River in China, the sole member of the family Lipotidae and a lineage that had diverged from other river dolphins some sixteen to twenty million years earlier. Pale grey above and white below, with very poor eyesight and a long, slightly upturned beak, it navigated the murky river largely by echolocation. In Chinese tradition it was revered as the “Goddess of the Yangtze.”
As China industrialized, the baiji was caught between many pressures at once. It was killed by entanglement in fishing gear, especially rolling-hook longlines, and increasingly by electrofishing; it was struck by the heavy boat traffic of one of the world’s busiest rivers; and its habitat was degraded by dam construction, pollution, and dredging.
The population fell with terrible speed: from an estimated 6,000 animals in the 1950s to roughly 400 by 1980, and to just 13 confirmed in a survey of 1997. A six-week international survey in late 2006 covering the dolphin’s entire historical range in the main Yangtze channel found not a single baiji.
On the basis of that survey the species was declared functionally extinct in a 2007 paper — the first cetacean driven to extinction by human activity in modern times, and the disappearance of an entire mammal family. A single unconfirmed sighting was reported in 2007, but no baiji has been verified since.
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.