As you've no doubt figured
out by now, it's Friday again. If you're still thinking it's
Thursday, well, it's not.
This week, we'll be taking a
look at some of the world's deadest animals. Such as:
1) The quagga is apparently
what happens when you cross a zebra with a horse. It was, apparently,
named after the sound it made.
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| Imagine it making that sound and try not to laugh. |
The quagga is one of many
animals hunted to extinction because for its hide, tasty flesh, and
because it was in our freaking way, dang it. Wild quaggas were wiped
out sometime in the 1870s, and the last captive one died on 12 August
1883. Naturalists of the time were a bit confused about zebras in
general, because each zebra has its own unique pattern of stripes.
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| They're like snowflakes if snowflakes looked like horses. ~ Pharaoh Hound, Fir0002 |
As a result, they had a bit
of a hard time classifying zebras into distinct species. So, the
quagga has the distinction of being the first extinct animal to have
its DNA analyzed. Genetecists at the Smithsonian Institution have
determined that the quagga was not, in fact, a separate species. It
was, just a really weird-looking zebra, so I should probably kick it
off the list.
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| Get out of here, you. |
Scientists with the Quagga
Project are now trying to bring the quagga back. They're going to do
this by breeding weird-looking zebras together until they get some
that look weird in just the right way. As of 2005, they've managed to
come up with a zebra foal that sort of looks a little bit like a
quagga.
2) The aurochs is the ancestor of our domesticated cattle. It looked like a cow.
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| Surprisingly enough. |
Aurochs were, however, much
bigger than regular cows. The average bull was about 5 feet 10 inches
(1.8 meters) tall at the shoulders, and holy sh*t, that's taller than
me.
These ginormous cattle were
native to Europe, Asia and North Africa. They were popular subjects
for prehistoric cave paintings. Humans began domesticating them about
8,000 years ago. By the 13th century, the aurochs' massive
range had dwindled to a small section of Eastern Europe. By the 17th
century, the aurochs survived only in Poland. The royal family
attempted to preserve the species by appointing gamekeepers to
provide them with grazing lands. Hunting the aurochs was forbidden,
on pain of death.
The last aurochs died in
1627, on a royal game preserve in the Jaktorow Forest. Her skull is
on display in the Royal Armory museum in Stockholm, Sweden.
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| Because when you invade a country, you totally loot its giant cow skull. |
3) Not so long ago, the
passenger pigeon was one of the most numerous birds in North America.
When European conquest (I mean, er, settlement) began, there were
probably anywhere from three to five billion passenger pigeons in the
US. As late as 1866, a flock of 3.5 billion birds was spotted passing
over southern Ontario. The flock was said to be one mile (1.6
kilometers) wide and 300 miles (483 kilometers) long. It took 14
hours to pass overhead.
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| That is a lot of freaking birds. |
The passenger pigeon died
out because we hunted the f*ck out of it. Passenger pigeon meat
became a popular food in the early 1800s, because their sheer numbers
meant they were easy to hunt and cheap to buy. Professional hunters
would find a colony of passenger pigeons and kill as many as 50,000
birds per day, selling the meat in the cities for food or fertilizer.
Some trapped the birds alive to sell as shooting targets. Poor
people, servants and slaves usually didn't get any other type of
meat.
Unfortunately for them,
passenger pigeons were extremely social creatures. Their colonies
often covered hundreds of miles and included tens of thousands, or
even hundreds of thousands, of birds. They nested communally and
needed to gather together in huge numbers in order to breed. By the
time it was realized that the passenger pigeon was going extinct,
there weren't enough birds left to establish a breeding flock.
4) The thylacine, or
Tasmanian tiger, went extinct in 1936. A few people have reported
seeing them since then, and have even come up with grainy photographs
and footage, but the continued existence of this ugly bugger remains
unproven.
The thylacine is thought to
have become extinct on mainland Australia in the 19th
century, largely due to competition for food from dingoes and humans.
It continued to thrive on the southern island of Tasmania until the
1930s. The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial, and one of only two
known marsupial species in which both male and female specimens have
pouches.
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| The male used his to cover his nuts. I'm not joking. |
These animals hunted at
night, probably by ambush. Evidence suggests that a group of
thylacines would single out a prey animal, then run it into
exhaustion. Other thylacines would wait in the bushes, then leap out
and kill the weakened prey. They may have hunted wallabies, wombats,
birds, kangaroos and possums. The Tasmanian emu, one of its primary
food sources, went extinct around 1850, and this may have contributed
to the thylacine's own extinction.
For the most part, however,
humans are blamed for eradicating the thylacine. Aren't we just
awesome.
European farmers in Tasmania
believed that thylacines were killing their sheep. As early as the
1830s, bounties were introduced. Other factors contributing to the
thylacine's extinction are believed to include disease, extinction of
the animal's prey species, and destruction of its habitat. A law to
protect the thylacine was passed on 10 July 1936. The last wild
thylacine was probably killed in 1930, but not to worry, we captured them on film.
5) No list of extinct
animals would be complete without the dodo bird, possibly the most
widely-known extinct animal of all time. These flightless birds lived
on the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. Their extinction was
entirely our fault.
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| As usual. |
The dodo was a
ground-nesting bird, about 3.3 feet (1 meter) tall, and weighing
about 44 pounds (20 kilos). It tasted like chicken.
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| No, actually, it tasted like crap. |
Dodos enjoyed a life free of
predators on their island paradise, so they never developed that
crucial survivial instinct known as common sense. When humans arrived
on Mauritius, the dodos showed no fear of them, or their animal
friends. While it's commonly believed that the dodos were hunted into
extinction, please remember that they tasted like crap. It's more
likely that the dogs, cats, pigs and rats humans brought to Mauritius
were responsible for killing off the dodos, both by eating them and
by destroying their nests. The official extinction date for the dodo
is 1693, a little more than 100 years after the species was
discovered.
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| This is why we can't have nice things. |
