Extinction: Examples and Reasons Part 1

What does extinct mean? It’s a scientific word that describes an animal that is not alive today, because it was killed off, meaning there is no more left to be found. I’m going to share with you 5 different examples of extinct animals.

1 The Great Auk

Even though it’s sometimes called the “Auk penguin,” they were actually more related to flying seabirds that are alive today, like the lesser auk, puffins, and murres. Unlike puffins that can fly, the great auk was flightless. Like penguins, they were slow on land but were great swimmers, hunting a few kinds of fish and crustaceans. They lived on small islands in the Atlantic, off the coasts of Great Britain, Iceland, and eastern North America.

There were Icelandic seamen who not only hunted them, but lived to tell about the Great Auk.

One naturalist John Wolley interviewed two Icelandic fishermen who killed the last of the auks. While they did hunt them for food, they also hunted them for selfish reasons.

On June third, 1844, two men, Jon Brandsson, and Sigurour Isleifsson both killed the last pair of great auks on earth, on the island of Eldey. The event was a horrible extinction. They only killed them in order to sell them to museums. There are stuffed auks as well as organs to this day, on display in museums.

2 Golden Toad

The golden toad is a extinct species of true toad that once roamed the tropical mountainous forests in Costa Rica. During the dry season, they hid in their moist burrows, then emerged around late March – April, to mate for the first few weeks in rain water pools, and the females laid their eggs among the tree roots. The diet of these toads were small insects. No one is for sure what caused their extinction, but there are hypothesis. One possibility is an infectious fungus, that is wiping out other populations of frogs and toads today. So I believe that it just might have been a fungus that caused their extinction.

3 Tasmanian Tiger

The largest carnivorous marsupial that lived, the Tasmanian Tiger looked like a cross between a wolf, and a tiger. About the size of a border collie, it’s closest living relatives are numbats and the Tasmanian devil. It was one of the few species of marsupials where both genders had pouches. Some of their favorite kinds of prey were kangaroos, wallabies and wombats. One nature show I watched depicted and described the animal, as a long endurance pursuing predator, but hunters reported the tiger as an ambusher. So it would be more possible that it would have been an ambush hunter.

When Europeans came to Tasmania, they started sheep farming, that caused the tigers to hunt easier prey. Even though they were never dangerous to people, everyone thought they were, so people started hunting them, to protect their livestock. There was also the issue of habitat loss.

The last Tasmanian tiger whose name was Benjamin lived in captivity at Hobart zoo, in Tasmania, and died in 1936. Photographic analysis in 2011 showed it was a male. In the last few decades, there have been unconfirmed sightings of the Tasmanian tiger, in some areas. So there is a possibility it could still be out there waiting to be rediscovered.

4 Rocky Mountain Locust

The rocky mountain locust is an extinct species of grasshopper, that once roamed the western half of North America, from Canada, to Texas and even in the eastern part of my home state of Oregon. Like modern locusts, they were a big struggle for people who moved to the west in the 1800s, destroying farmer’s crops in the trillions. The locusts laid their eggs in the ground on the great prairies, and after hatching they emerged as locusts.

Like their modern day relatives, they would consume any green plant in their path, including corn or wheat. If there were that many, how could they have gone extinct?! Farmers scared them away using gun powder, setting fires, and using hopper dozers. Hopper dozers were a type of plow device pulled behind horses, that had a shield that knocked the insects into a pan of poison or fuel. Some people also used vacuum cleaner – like devices to suck them up. Many of these ideas reduced the locust numbers, and drove them to extinction.

One interesting way entomologist, Charles Valentine Riley drove them to extinction, was cooking them. He came up with a recipe of locusts seasoned with salt and pepper and pan – fried in butter. The last recorded sighting of one was in 1902 in southern Canada.

5 Carolina Parakeet

North America’s only parrot, the Carolina parakeet lived from southern New England, New York, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Gulf of Mexico. Some populations also lived in eastern Colorado. Males had that yellow head with red face, while the females had a green head, but both of the genders bodies were green. These parakeets lived in loud flocks around 200 or 300. They built nests inside a hollow tree, laying two to five eggs (most reports say two). The birds ate mostly seeds from trees like, pine, maple, oak, and cypress for some examples, and also ate fruit like figs apples and grapes. Farmers saw them as pest for eating their grain.

One of the reasons for the parakeets extinction was habitat loss, when Europeans started cutting down it’s deciduous forests. Another reason was the pet trade, selling them as pets. People also hunted them for their feathers to decorate on ladies hats, and to prevent them from feasting on their crops. The last captive parakeet named Incas died in 1918, in the Cincinnati zoo. Surprisingly, Incas lived in the same cage as Martha the last passenger pigeon. Martha died in 1914, four years before Incas.

Biblical Answer

The reason for these creatures extinctions all started when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden. When they ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, they not only brought sin into the world, but death also. After the fall, people started driving different kinds of animals to extinction, in many ways. Over hunting, habitat loss, disease, bringing in animals from other countries to wipe out native creatures. Today, all those reasons are still driving other animals like the Black Rhino, the Giant Panda, and the Yosemite toad to extinction.

The earth is not going to last forever. God describes in Isaiah 11, how the wolf will lie with the lamb, and that the lion will become a vegetarian again, on the New Earth. There will be animals in Heaven. On the New Earth, everyone who believes in Him will spend good times with Jesus Himself, and all creation.

It is possible, if it is God’s will, that some of those Endangered and extinct animals will live with us in Heaven, forever.

Thank you so much for reading this, I’ll tell you my own experiences with extinct animals in part two. This is Maximus Adventures, over and out!

“The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.” 1 Jn. 2:17

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the water cover the sea”. Isaiah 11: 6 – 9

“Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness”. 2 Peter 3: 13