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 great auk (Pinguinus impennis) was a large, flightless seabird of the North Atlantic and the original “penguin” — the name was applied to it long before it was transferred to the unrelated birds of the Southern Hemisphere. Standing around 75–85 cm tall and weighing roughly 5 kg, it was black above and white below, with a heavy hooked bill marked by deep grooves and a distinctive white patch in front of each eye. Superbly adapted to swimming and diving but unable to fly, it came ashore only to breed, on a handful of remote rocky islets.
Its breeding range stretched across the North Atlantic, from islands off eastern Canada — most famously Funk Island off Newfoundland — to St Kilda off Scotland and the volcanic skerries of Geirfuglasker and Eldey off Iceland. On land, where it was clumsy and defenceless, vast colonies made it brutally easy to harvest.
For centuries the great auk was killed for its meat, its eggs, its fat (rendered for oil) and its down. The slaughter intensified during the great Funk Island feather trade, when crews killed the birds in enormous numbers and rendered them in cauldrons. As the species grew scarce, a second and decisive pressure emerged: museums and private collectors, eager to obtain skins and eggs of an obviously vanishing bird, paid rising prices that turned the last survivors into prizes — a documented case of extinction accelerated by collecting.
The last confirmed pair of great auks was killed on the Icelandic islet of Eldey on 3 June 1844, taken for a collector; the single egg they had been incubating was crushed in the process. Their deaths are among the best-documented extinction events of any species, and the great auk became an early and powerful argument for the protection of birds.
Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) was a giant cold-water sirenian, a relative of the living manatees and dugongs, that grazed on kelp in the shallow coastal waters of the Bering Sea. Reaching lengths estimated at eight to nine meters and weights of several tonnes, it was by far the largest sirenian of recent times and one of the largest marine mammals outside the whales.
The species was made known to science in 1741, when the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller observed it during Vitus Bering’s expedition, after the ship wrecked and the crew was stranded on what is now Bering Island in the Commander group. By that time the animal already appears to have been a relict, confined to the waters around the Commander Islands, with a population estimated at only around 1,500 to 2,000 individuals.
Large, slow, buoyant, and seemingly unafraid of humans, the sea cow was extraordinarily easy to kill. Fur-hunting and sealing crews working the newly opened North Pacific route slaughtered it for its meat and its thick fat to provision their voyages. Within roughly 27 years of Steller’s first description, around 1768, the species was gone.
Steller’s sea cow has become the textbook example of rapid post-contact extinction: a large, conspicuous animal driven from scientific discovery to total disappearance in under three decades, documented almost entirely by the single naturalist who first described it.
The quagga (Equus quagga quagga) was a subspecies of the plains zebra native to the dry Karoo and the grasslands of South Africa’s Cape, ranging largely south of the Orange River. It was distinguished by a striking, incomplete coat: bold brown-and-white stripes on the head and neck that faded progressively down the body and dissolved into a plain reddish-brown on the hindquarters and legs, which appeared almost horse-like. Its common name, transcribed from a Khoikhoi word, was onomatopoeic, imitating its barking call, rendered as “kwa-ha-ha.”
Through the first half of the nineteenth century the quagga was hunted intensively by European settlers, principally for its meat and hide and to remove a grazing competitor with domestic sheep and goats. Because contemporary observers used the word “quagga” loosely for several kinds of zebra, the animal’s status as a distinct form was poorly understood, and its disappearance from the veld went largely unremarked at the time.
The last wild quaggas were extirpated in the late 1870s; the final wild individual is generally reckoned to have died around 1878. A handful of captive animals lingered in European zoological gardens, the last of them a mare at the Natura Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam, who died on 12 August 1883. No one at the time recognized that her death marked the end of the subspecies.
The quagga survives today only as roughly two dozen mounted specimens, a few skeletons, and a small set of photographs of a single living animal taken in London. It holds two distinctions in the history of extinction: in 1984 it became the first extinct animal to have its DNA studied, and since 1987 it has been the subject of the Quagga Project, a long-running attempt to breed back its distinctive coat pattern from living plains zebras.