Hall of shame: Seven species that humans wiped out

14 November 2013

As our ancestors spread across the globe, they were followed by wave upon wave of extinction. Countless species have died out and now there are more than 16,000 under threat, most from loss of habitat. However, only a handful of extinctions can be blamed entirely on us. Here are seven of them. Graham Lawton

Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas; extinct 1768)

In 1741, German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller visited the uninhabited Komandorski Islands in the Bering Sea off Russia’s east coast. There he discovered an aquatic mammal resembling an enormous dugong, 7 metres long and 6 tonnes in weight. He called it Steller’s sea cow, one of seven animal species named after him.

Steller died during the expedition and news of the discovery wasn’t published until 1751. Shortly afterwards, the islands became a regular stopping-off point for hungry Russian sealers who . The last one was killed in 1768.

(Image: Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Bluebuck (Hippotragus leucophaeus; last confirmed sighting ~1800)

When European settlers arrived in southern Africa in the mid-17th century, they wasted little time shooting and killing everything in sight. Many species were nearly exterminated but only one – the blue antelope or bluebuck – was driven to extinction.

Confined to a small corner of Africa’s southern tip, the blueish-grey antelope was rare even before settlers arrived. It was never formally described while still alive – the species is known to science only from a handful of pelts and skulls. Nonetheless, it is considered a separate species, unlike the quagga, which was thought to be similarly separate when it went extinct in the late 1800s but is now known to have been a subspecies of the common zebra. The bluebuck is thus the only large sub-Saharan mammal to go extinct in historical times.

(Image: Martin Harvey/Getty Images)

Mauritius blue pigeon (Alectroenas nitidissima; last confirmed sighting 1826)

The small Indian Ocean island of Mauritius is associated with the most infamous of all human-induced extinctions. When Portuguese sailors arrived in 1507, they found the place teeming with a previously unknown species of large flightless bird. A little over 150 years later, the dodo had been bludgeoned into oblivion.

That didn’t keep the settlers from their dinner, however. They quickly got to work on another of Mauritius’s endemic birds, the blue pigeon. Although slightly harder to catch on account of being able to fly, it was similarly tame, stupid and tasty. Within another 150 years it too was gone.

(Image: J. Reinold)

Great auk (Pinguinus impennis; last confirmed sighting 1852)

Until recently, the great auk was thought to be the only extinct species whose final moments were recorded for posterity. On 2 June 1844, three men clambered onto Eldey, a rocky island off the coast of Iceland. The next day, they captured and strangled a breeding pair of great auks and smashed the egg they were incubating. The carcasses were sold to a collector – the last of this magnificent bird, mercilessly hunted to extinction for its meat, eggs and pelts.

However, it now seems that this large flightless seabird – the “penguin of the north” – survived a bit longer. A sighting off the Canadian island of Newfoundland in 1852 is accepted as genuine.

(Image: G. Dagli Orti/UIG/DEA/Rex)

Falkland Islands wolf (Dusicyon australis; extinct 1876)

We may not know the exact time and date of the great auk’s demise, but that of the Falkland Islands wolf is a bit clearer. The last known individual was killed at Shallow Cove on West Falkland in 1876.

When settlers first arrived in the Falklands half a century earlier, the wolf – actually more like a fox – was common. But it attacked the settlers’ sheep and stole their food, and like many island species it was fearless and easy to kill. The settlers took full advantage.

(Image: Natural History Museum, London/SPL)

Passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius; last confirmed sighting in the wild 1900, last zoo specimen died 1914)

When Martha the passenger pigeon died in Cincinnati Zoo, Ohio, on 1 September 1914, her kind had not been seen in the wild for 14 years. Once she was gone, they were not seen at all.

It was a far cry from a century earlier, when passenger pigeons were one of the most abundant birds in the world, forming flocks so large that they were said to take three days to pass over an area. In 1810, naturalist Alexander Wilson estimated that one flock alone contained 2 billion birds.

Even at that time, the pigeons were being trapped in their millions to be sold for food, or as living targets for shooting galleries. By the 1860s, numbers were dwindling noticeably and, by 1890, the bird was rarely seen. The last sighting in the wild was in 1900; the bird was promptly shot dead.

(Image: Wisconsin Historical Society/Everett Collection/Rex)

Caribbean monk seal (Monachus tropicalis, last confirmed sighting 1952)

When Christopher Columbus landed on the barren island of Alto Velo on his second voyage to the Americas in 1494, he and his men became the first Europeans to see the only native seal of the Caribbean Sea. They went ashore and killed eight of them.

The slaughter set the pattern for the next 450 years. The docile Caribbean monk seal was hunted remorselessly for its meat and, latterly, oil, which was used to lubricate plantation machinery. The last confirmed sighting was in 1952 on a reef between Nicaragua and Jamaica. Unconfirmed sightings were made after that, but the seal was officially declared extinct in 2008 after an extensive survey of its former range found no trace.

(Image: Robert Chase/SPL)

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