Recent Extinctions Wiki



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This is a wiki that collects all known extinct animals that went extinct after coming into contact with modern humans, Homo Sapiens. When exactly modern humans arrived varies per location and is poorly known in many cases. Therefore, this site collects all animals that went extinct within the last 50.000 years.

The IUCN Red List has an arbitrary cut-off date of 1500AD for what species it covers, even though at that point, many hundreds, possibly thousands of species had already gone extinct at the hand of modern humans. This gives a falsely rose-colored impression of the amount of damage we have already caused to our planet's ecosystems. I hope we can rectify that image by building up a robust database of ALL known animals that died out after modern humans invaded their habitats.

The vast majority of extinct species are either megafauna or island taxa.

NOTE I am currently trying to collect and add ALL known bird, mammal & reptile species that went extinct in the last 50.000 years and adding them to the Mainland Taxa, Australian Taxa & Island Taxa lists. After that the priority is to add all of them to the bird, mammal and reptile taxonomic lists. Once these are pretty much complete I may start focusing on the amphibians and fishes.

How this Site works
Island Taxa: NO, MID or YES.

NO are animals from mainland Australia and the American and Afro-Eurasian super continents.

MID are animals endemic to the largest islands: Greenland, New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar, Sumatra, Honshu, Great Britain, Sulawesi, South Island & North Island in New Zealand, Java and Baffin, Victoria & Ellesmere in Canada.

YES are animals endemic to any of the smaller islands.

Lists
By geography: By taxonomy:
 * Mainland Taxa is a list of all animals that occurred on the mainland of America, Africa & Eurasia
 * Australian Taxa is a list of all animals that occurred on the mainland of Australia.
 * Island Taxa is a list of all animals endemic to islands, grouped by geography.
 * Mammals by taxonomy.

Main Categories

 * Australasian
 * Oriental
 * Palearctic
 * Afrotropic
 * Nearctic
 * Neotropic
 * Oceanic
 * Antarctic


 * Mammals
 * Birds
 * Reptiles
 * Amphibians
 * 'Fishes'


 * Megafauna
 * Island Taxa
 * De-extinction Projects

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