A Gallery of Species Lost

True, there was always extinctions, they will continue even when WE are gone. Make no mistake WE are among the ones destined for extension mostly because our loss of respect, work ethic, and COMPLETE LOSS OF REALITY. This will cause our demise sooner that expected. There are just to many idiots professing intelligence to carry on. Mother earth's wonders will be here for other animals and plants to enjoy when we are gone. I am afraid we will make this world very hostile place long before we leave it. Some have a false belief that this world is ours to do with what we please, that is where the lunitic fringe and I disagree.

"horrible" "sad"

Species come, species go. They always have, they always will. We can shame ourselves all we want, but mother nature doesn't care. Hell, sometimes she encourages it. It's only to be expected considering we are the dominant species just about everywhere on the planet, and a territorial one at that. Now, that's not to say we should just go out and start genociding animals or legalize endangered hunting, but it's not exactly anything to fret over.

Wow, that is just so sad. It is hard to grasp the reality that our lifestyle choices are behind this kind of loss, often at a very minute level as we go through life without thinking about how, what and why we are consuming what we are consuming.

rabbits?

grizzly bears used to dominate california, so much so that a grizzly is on the state flag. the last one was shot in 1899.

Great post, I thought these were particularly interesting:

"Gastric brooding frogs, discovered in Australia in the 1980s, raise their young in their stomachs and secrete a substance that protects them from being digested. This promised to provide a new treatment for human peptic ulcers, which afflict 25 million Americans. But when the species went extinct, scientists abandoned the research."

"the diverse tree snails on the South Pacific's Society Islands provided key evidence about how species vary, helping to bring Darwinism and genetics together. But in the 1970s, in a particularly brainless piece of biological control, agriculturalists introduced a predatory snail to fight an introduced farm pest—and instead wiped out almost all the native species, including this Moorean viviparous tree snail."

"China’s Baiji, a freshwater dolphin, was known as “the Goddess of the Yangtze,” for the river where it lived for 20 million years. Heavy use of the Yantze in recent years for hydroelectricity and industrial purposes probably finished off the species, last seen in 2007."

"Species are now disappearing in similar circumstances worldwide, generally without having been studied, at what researchers say is 100 to 1000 times the normal rate of extinction—much faster than they can be replaced by the evolution of new species. It's being called the Sixth Great Extinction, comparable in scale to the one that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago."

Another good gallery would be all of the human civilizations, tribes and cultures that are now extinct because of actions by other humans.

All these beautiful animals, gone.