A collection
Extinct Species
Species that no longer exist — the dodo, the thylacine, and the field guide of animals lost within historical memory. A reminder of what conservation is trying not to repeat.
Some extinctions are deep-time events — dinosaurs, trilobites, the mammoth megafauna of the Pleistocene. Others happened within the span of European naval exploration and the spread of industrial agriculture, and we have written records, paintings, and in some cases photographs of the animals themselves. This collection covers the latter: species that disappeared within a few centuries of their first contact with industrial human activity and whose extinction is preserved in the written and visual record. They are the animals quoted in every conservation appeal and the species whose loss made 'extinction' a word the general public understood. We illustrate them in the woodcut tradition that documented them in the first place, sometimes from the last surviving specimens, sometimes from the only contemporary paintings we have.
