大象传媒

In his new series, The Extinction Tapes, Rob Newman tells the stories of five once thriving animals now wiped from the planet. We may often think of extinction as a rare occurrence, wiping out the dinosaurs and such, but as Newman’s show demonstrates, extinction happens with alarming regularity.

Here are the five creatures featured in The Extinction Tapes, plus two others we’ll sadly never see again.

The eradication of this simple creature revealed darker truths about the water, which was being filled with dangerous chemicals from factories and causing fatal sickness in the mainly African-American community that lived by it.

Also declared extinct in 2006, the Chinese Yangtze river dolphin was a pale, putty-coloured mammal that looked rather less sleek and elegant than its sea-swimming cousins.

Its plain looks hid a highly evolved echo location system, far superior to other dolphins. It was so finely tuned it could even identify the position of individual fish.

Its extreme sensitivity became a hazard, however, as the river filled with fishing boats, container ships, trawlers and man-made pollution. The Yangtze river dolphin, confused by such high traffic, had no chance of survival.

Living on the border between Ghana and the Ivory Coast, Miss Waldron’s Red colobus was a mid-sized, red-maned monkey with no thumbs.

A gentle thing used to living in large groups high up in tree canopies, it was forced to change its way of life as man began to cut down its forest habitat.

As patches of forest reduced in size, the Red colobus groups became too small, leading to less protection against predators and genetic weakness caused by in-breeding. It was declared extinct in 2019.

It’s an odd honour to be the most famous extinct bird, but for some reason the dodo is the one long-gone species, aside from dinosaurs, that everybody knows.

The daffy-looking flightless bird once lived on the island of Mauritius, without any natural predators.

When humans arrived on Mauritius, bringing with them other animals and their own appetite for meat, the dodo did not last long. The last ones waddled off their mortal coil in the late 1700s.

The poor old quagga’s unusual beauty was the reason for its extinction.

This remarkable looking African animal had a front half that was striped like a zebra, but those stripes faded away on its back half, which was plain and brown like a horse.

It was hunted into extinction by poachers who prized its strange looks, with the last one dying in captivity in the 1880s.