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Some rare images of captive Toolache wallabies (Macropus greyi) that I personally hadn't seen before. The bottom image is of the last known individual, a female who died in 1939.

Pictures from REPAD.

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Taxidermy quagga at the Zoological Museum Amsterdam By: Unknown photographer From: Le Zebre 1913

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I'd reckon that most naturalists know about the plight of the passenger pigeon or Carolina parakeet. Less so this member of the unfortunate little club of the North American bird species driven to extinction in relatively recent history. You are missed, Labrador duck, native to the east coast of North America and last seen in 1878.

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In 1924, a mother Sumatran rhinoceros is shot and killed in the Pegu Range of present-day Myanmar, while her young calf is captured alive and sent to the Yangon Zoo (then known as the Rangoon Zoo). Following his death shortly thereafter, his body is reunited with that of his mother at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Today, the over 100-year-old pair remain on display, tucked away in a corner of the museum's Hall of Asian Mammals. The aged placard that accompanies their taxidermied remains not only minces words on the tragedy of their collection, but leaves out that the pair represent the critically endangered, if not already extinct, northern subspecies of Sumatran rhinoceros, Dicerorhinus sumatrensis lasiotis.

[ The taxidermied remains of a female Northern Sumatran rhinoceros and her calf, photographed by myself, endlingmusings. ]

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Captive Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1941

Photos courtesy of Harold Bucher

Four previously unpublished photographs of Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpeckers by Tim Gallagher originally published in the Winter 2007 edition of Living Bird.

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[ Some of the canine members of Working Dogs for Conservation, photo courtesy of the organization. ]

"Sumatran rhinos — hairy and noisy — were thought to have gone extinct from southern Sumatra for years. Then came the dogs. Recently, dogs with Working Dogs for Conservation have discovered what are believed to be several heaps of Sumatran rhino dung in Way Kambas National Park, located in the southern part of the Indonesian island. The scat has undergone one test to confirm it was deposited by a Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis); two tests remain until the Indonesian government is certain. Still, conservationists are cautiously optimistic. Nina Fascione, executive director of the International Rhino Foundation (IRF), says she would have bet her paycheck that there were no rhinos left in Way Kambas. “You can’t prove a negative,” she says, but she advocated for the dogs to prove that no more resources should be used in the park for rhinos. They’d tried everything to locate any remaining rhinos in Way Kambas, she says: the government, the local NGO YABI, and IRF had deployed rangers searching for rhinos, camera traps and drones for years — nothing. “[So], let’s get dogs in there. We’ll say we’ve tried everything,” Fascione says. After years of searching, it took the dogs, named Yagi and Quinn, just two days to find the scat. “I was nothing short of thrilled,” says Pete Coppolillo, executive director of Working Dogs for Conservation. “With fewer than 50 [Sumatran rhinos] in the entire global population, even a single individual is a big deal.” Coppolillo says the dogs are trained for three to four months, but after that they can “learn a new target in an afternoon.” Still, the team trains the dogs for several weeks on its new target, using every type possible: male, female, juvenile. The dogs were trained on scat from 10 captive rhinos at the Way Kambas Rhino Sanctuary."

- Excerpt from "Sniffer dogs may have rediscovered a lost population of Sumatran rhinos" by Jeremy Hance.

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Look hard at my stripes, there'll be no more after me

Day 23 - extinct

[ID: photo of a drawing made in two pages of a small notebook. It features a tiger showing the stripes on their sides, looking back at the viewer. There's text at the top left of the first page and at the bottom right of the second one written in Spanish in all caps. The first page says "Mira bien mis rayas," which translates to "Look hard at my stripes,"; the text on second page says "no habrá más después de mí", which translates to "there'll be no more after me". The drawing was made with felt-tip pens and crayons. End ID]

I still wanna do day 28, but I'm a little busy, so have this one in the meantime. It's dedicated to the Javan, Bali and Caspian tiger subspecies, now extinct due to intense hunting.

Also, this was inspired by the "Extinction" PMV, which lists the many wildlife species that were lost due to human activity and includes the Javan tiger, I highly recommend it!

Prompt list by @mammoth-clangen

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feeling like pure shit just want the thylacine back

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A pair of toolache wallabies, illustrated by Henry Constantine Richter. Once inhabiting the swampy grasslands of southeastern South Australia and southwestern Victoria, the destruction of their habitat played a large role in the extinction of this species. The last verified sightings of wild individuals took place in 1924. [ x ]

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Taxidermy quagga stallion who lived at Regent's Park Zoo from 1858 to 1864, housed at the British Museum By: Zoological Society of London From: The Empire of Equus 1974

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"The D. Antarticus is full three feet long, the tail thirteen inches, and the height at the shoulder fifteen inches ; the body is bulky, the legs low, and the head wolf-like; above, the colour is formed of hairs ringed with black and fulvous, together with dark tan; the belly and inside of the limbs are pale whitish buff, the throat dirty white, the middle of the tail brown and the extremity white."

[ Illustration and description of a Falkland Islands wolf, as featured in "The Naturalist's Library Mammalia, Vol. 9: Dogs, Canidae or Genus Canis of Authors". ]

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Angela Gram (American, 1985) - Endling (2022)

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The last known wild-born Spix's macaw (right) and his blue-winged macaw mate (left), photographed by iNaturalist user vkurtlo in March, 1992. Neither bird has been seen since 2000, and both are presumed deceased. [ x ]

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On conservation and survival

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In 1924, a mother Sumatran rhinoceros is shot and killed in the Pegu Range of present-day Myanmar, while her young calf is captured alive and sent to the Yangon Zoo (then known as the Rangoon Zoo). Following his death shortly thereafter, his body is reunited with that of his mother at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Today, the over 100-year-old pair remain on display, tucked away in a corner of the museum's Hall of Asian Mammals. The aged placard that accompanies their taxidermied remains not only minces words on the tragedy of their collection, but leaves out that the pair represent the critically endangered, if not already extinct, northern subspecies of Sumatran rhinoceros, Dicerorhinus sumatrensis lasiotis.

[ The taxidermied remains of a female Northern Sumatran rhinoceros and her calf, photographed by myself, endlingmusings. ]

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Campephilus principalis bairdii, A male Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker photographed by John Dennis

A last remnant of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers in Cuba" The Auk, Volume 65, Number 4, October, 1948

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"By the time the plan was implemented there was one Po’ouli left. They brought the last one in to captivity and when this bird died it was shipped to us immediately. By that time we were prepared to do everything we could to establish a cell line at the Frozen Zoo. Working with the Po’ouli, I remember thinking “isn’t it a shame, here we are the first people to look at the chromosomes of the Po’ouli, from the last individual of this bird.” This makes a big impression."

- Excerpt from "Tales From A Frozen Zoo" by Mark Szotek.

[ One of the last known po'ouli. Photo courtesy of the San Diego Zoo. ]