Extinct in the 2000s: The First 25 Years Quiz

Answer: Bandicoot

Of the answer choices, only the bandicoot is a marsupial. The Nullarbor barred bandicoot, native to Australia's southern deserts, and the south-eastern striped bandicoot, native to South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, were declared extinct in 2025. As often happens to islands, the colonization of Australia introduced many destabilizing species. Foxes, cats, and, surprisingly, rabbits, which devoured vegetation and bred like... you can guess, all brought hardship on the bandicoots.

In 1857, the south-eastern striped bandicoot was said to be plentiful along the banks of the Murray River. Though foxes were brought to NSW as late as 1845, and rabbits in 1859, the decline of these bandicoots was already noted by the 20th century. Although the official extinction declaration is recent, the Nullarbor barred bandicoot was last seen in 1928. This is one of many cases of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) being slow to update its Red List.

Answer: Slender-billed curlew

Curlews are about as unassuming as birds come, and the demise of the slender-billed curlew has struck many as remarkably unnecessary. "The slender-billed curlew may not have had an economic value, it contributed nothing to the bottom line of anyone's financial spreadsheet, no one relied on these birds for their jobs or wellbeing," wrote Mary Colwell, on behalf of the group Curlew Action. Yet despite ornithologists recognizing it was critically endangered as early as 1943, the first efforts to protect it - a few surveys - came in 1996, the year after its final sighting. As the bird was little-studied, we aren't even sure why its population quietly disappeared.

The incorrect answers are some exceptional cases of "extinct" birds being spotted again after some time (the black-naped pheasant-pigeon evaded birders for 126 years!). But there is an argument for accepting these extinctions are final, so that resources can be allocated to save those on the *verge* of disappearing. Our next species offers an excellent case of such a hunt...

Answer: Ivory-billed woodpecker

Last seen in Cuba in 1987, America's largest woodpecker was the ivory-billed woodpecker. Logging decimated the woodpeckers' habitats, and they were already extremely rare by the 1920s. The IUCN still lists the birds listed as "Critically Endangered," while other groups presume it to be extinct.

The ivory-billed woodpecker has since taken on the status of something like a cryptid, appearing in suspiciously grainy videos and tenuous audio links. Like the widely-distributed pileated woodpecker, they are large (about crow-sized), and males have jet-black plumage and conspicuous crests, so even experts are liable to confuse them - to say nothing of those pulling the wool over our eyes. Professor Chris Elphick has pointed out, "There are these incredibly rare birds that live in the middle of the Amazon that people can get good, identifiable photographs of, and yet people have spent hundreds of thousands of hours trying to find and photograph ivory-billed woodpeckers in the United States."

Some ecologists have recognized that "charismatic" species (those people find cute, cool, or otherwise captivating) tend to get the literal lion's share of conservation attention. There's nothing wrong with us all loving certain animals, but in my opinion, when there are species out there like the slender-billed curlew that can be helped, but go ignored, it becomes irresponsible to spend so much effort chasing charismatic ghosts.

Answer: "Rio"

Truly wild Spix's macaws were last seen in 2016, and declared extinct in the wild in 2019. That has, however, since changed. Breeding pairs exist in captivity, and in 2022, twenty birds were released back into the wild. The return has been a rollercoaster: the reintroduced birds have produced several adult chicks, but in 2025, a survey of 11 of the birds found they were all afflicted with a deadly virus. Administrative issues, including accusations that conservators are failing to keep the birds healthy, continue to stymie the project. Unfortunately, these kinds of problems are the norm, not the exception, for reintroduced animals.

The movie "Rio" was a moderate success for Blue Sky Studios, and follows the last male Spix's macaw attempt to court the last female. With a sequel and an "Angry Birds" tie-in, it become that studio's second-most successful franchise, after another extinction-oriented film, "Ice Age."

Answer: Northern white rhinoceros

In 2009, the last four known northern white rhinos were taken to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, managed by a zoo in Czechia. Fifty years earlier, more than two thousand northern white rhinos lived in central Africa. They were eradicated by poachers selling their valuable horns for use in Chinese medicine.

When Sudan died, there were two female northern white rhinos remaining, his daughter Najin and her daughter Fatu. Although cross-breeding attempts with southern white rhinos were tried, neither of the females could reproduce.

However, hope for these rhinoceroses persists. Thirty embryos fertilized using eggs from Fatu and another female have been kept in cryogenic storage, awaiting surrogates from a southern white rhino.

Answer: Christmas Island

E.O. Wilson observed that "Every species is a masterpiece, exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived." But by the same token, the most isolated, particularized environments - islands - become the most vulnerable, like museums built next to active volcanoes.

The Christmas Island pipistrelle and Christmas Island whiptail-skink were both declared extinct in 2017, the Christmas sandpiper in 2014. Why these species declined remains mysterious; it seems largely to do with introduced species, including the widespread "yellow crazy ant" that humans have introduced to many tropical islands.

Other island species we've lost: a melomys (a mouse-like rodent) on storm-battered Bramble Cay; eight spiders on Seychelles; much of Hawaii and New Zealand's bird life; and the world's largest earwig (on St. Helena).

Answer: Lonesome George

When he was discovered on the Galápagos Island of Pinta in 1971, Lonesome George became a celebrity as the "rarest animal on Earth." He was taken to the Charles Darwin Research Center on Santa Cruz for study, protection, and breeding attempts. No other tortoises were discovered on the island, and although closely related subspecies were introduced to George as mates, he showed a lack of interest in all of them.

After more than 30 years of failed attempts, George finally produced about a dozen eggs in 2008. Sadly, the eggs were found to be unviable, apparently due to the genetic distance between George and the females.

Lonesome George died of natural causes at the youthful (for a tortoise) age of 102.

Answer: Another species of snail

The MVTS is a sad and ironic casualty of conservation efforts. Biologists sought to control an invasive species, the African land snail. How do you control snails? With bigger, meaner, snail-eating snails. Unfortunately, the chosen predator, the menacing-sounding rosy wolfsnail, also ravaged native snail populations in Moorea, Tahiti, and other French Polynesian islands. Nine endemic species have been extirpated by the rosy wolfsnail, though thankfully, the MVTS and others are - for now - kept alive in zoos.

Even microscopic snails are a crucial part of the biomass, serving as a staple food source. But land and and freshwater snails are among the most vulnerable groups of animals, since so many snails are geographically exclusive to single islands, single lakes, or single species of tree. The IUCN has classified a little over 900 animals as extinct, and fully one-third of those are gastropods (snails and slugs). Snail extinctions have been caused by river damming, forest clearing, mining, groundwater draining, stream rerouting, pollution, and even volcanic eruptions.

Answer: Yangtze River

Worldwide, five species of river dolphin have populated the Amazon, Indus, Ganges and, until recently, the Yangtze. The last sighting of a wild baiji (also called the Chinese river dolphin) came in 2002 - though as so often happens, less credible sightings are still occasionally reported.

Efforts to protect the baiji failed to understand the needs of the animals. The Chinese government established baiji reserves along the river, not realizing that the animals freely traversed the Yangtze in pursuit of migrating fishes. Attempts in the 1990s to capture and breed the baiji were unsuccessful as, by then, the animals were too rare to find.

The baiji isn't the only majestic species the Yangtze has lost in recent memory. Also departed are the Dabry's sturgeon, the Chinese paddlefish (another kind of sturgeon), and the Yangtze giant softshell turtle. All three were victims of fishing and shipping operations, pollution, and damming. Dabry's sturgeon is still raised in captivity in sufficient numbers to restock the species, but it seems that the reintroduced fish struggle to reproduce.

Answer: First extinct animal to be cloned

Native to the Pyrenees mountains, these ibexes competed with livestock for grazing lands. When the last Pyrenean ibex died in 2000, her genetic material was transplanted into the egg of a goat, which was then fertilized using preserved sperm. The cloned embryo was then inserted into a domestic goat. The resulting kid was born with severely deformed lungs that could only keep it alive for a few minutes - yet it was alive, and proved the process was possible.

This makes it the first animal un-extinction and the first animal to go extinct twice. This is a true, "Jurassic Park"-style return from the dead, unlike the various reintroduction attempts mentioned in this quiz, or the "back-breeding" of gray wolves into so-called "dire wolves" (which are behaviorally, but not genetically, closer to the dire wolves that went extinct during the Holocene). The hope is that the experience gained through this project can be used to bring back other species, such as woolly mammoths.