Extinct And Endangered

Indeed too many choices but my list will be:


Gould's most beautiful
Aepyornis maximus
Mergus australis
Thylacine

And because I love the name:

Vini vidivici

 

I would Choose

Dodo
Tasmanian Tiger
Moa
Sea Mink
Falkland Island Wolf

 

Both messages are very contradictory Brown Bear and Lion are both extant and common species! I never concerned too much about subspecies (and 99% of "hard" zoochatters here, only concern about subspecies of big animals, such as lions and bears... why on Earth one don't look for subspecies of house mouse, common sparrow, wall lizard or any invertebrate?!?!?!)

Well, now with the new extinction age restriction, I must change my list as all my choosed ones were extinct before man appears on Earth.

Porphyrio albus
Labidura herculeana
Camptorhynchus labradorius
Fregilupus varius
Bufo periglenes

But again there are too many to choose!

 

Carolina parakeet
Passenger pigeon
Labrador duck
Great auk
Aurochs

 

Can we bring back ten?

 

Best I figure it, the most essential thing to do would be to resurrect the species that have the biggest impact on the environment. I'll limit my suggestions to just North America, which is largely void of megafauna. I would suggest:
1. Wooly Mammoth
2. Columbian Mammoth
3. Megatherium
4. Panthera atrox
5. Carolina Parakeet

 

I'm going for size - on the principle that a good big 'un beats a good little 'un even when they are both dead

Aepyornis maximus (elephant bird)
Gigantopithecus blacki
Hydrodamalis gigas (Steller's sea cow)
Paraceratherium transouralicum ('Baluchitherium')
Smilodon populator (sabre-toothed tiger)

I reckon that a zoo with small groups of just these 5 species would really pull in the crowds. It would make Jurassic Park look like a funfair

Alan

 

I am sorry but I need to bring back ten...
Kouprey
Paradise parrot
Red rail
Crescent nail tail wallaby
Elephant bird

 

I'm going to have another try. This time I have chosen 5 species which be the ones which would be the most interesting to study.

Hallucigenia sparsa the strange fossil from the Burgess shale, which has been interpreted in several ways. Simon Conway Morris named it very appropriately as it is so strange. It may be an ancestor of the velvet worms. See Hallucigenia - Fossil Gallery - The Burgess Shale I wonder how much the real animal would resemble the reconstructions.

Tiktaalik roseae, the fossil fish from Greenland that Neil Shubin thinks was close to the ancestral tetrapod, as it could probably 'walk' out of the water. We would find out if we could study a live one. The anatomy of its soft parts would be very interesting too, as the fossils can't give much information about them. See Tiktaalik roseae: Home

An obvious choice is Archaeopteryx lithographica. How well could it fly? Did it climb up trees and fly down? Or did it run along level ground and use its wings to hop, skip and jump into the air? I'd also love to know what colour its feathers were.

It would be nice to compare old Archaeopteryx with a pterosaur. I thought first of Pteranodon or Quetzalcoatlus - but something smaller would be easier to manage and it would be nice to put one in a wind tunnel. I would choose Pterodactylus antiquus with a 1 metre wingspan. It was roughly contemporary with Archaeopteryx, but may have flown much better. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterodactylus

Finally I would have to pick an ornithschian dinosaur, I think Stegosaurus stenops would be good. Archaeopteryx is effectively a saurischian dinosaur, so the comparison would be interesting. Of less importance, but still interesting would be the real arrangement of the bony plates on its back and their real function - there have been a lot of hypotheses, without very much evidence.

Alan

 

This is hard!

Thylacine - if not extinct by humans, it would be the largest living marsupial!
Dodo - if not extinct by humans, it would be the largest living pigeon!
Great auk - if not extinct by humans, it would be a amazing seabird, as the Emperor penguin.
Steller's sea cow - if not extinct by humans, it would be the largest living sirenian!
Elephant bird/Moa - if not extinct by humans, either one would be the largest living land bird! If the Moa back from extinction, it would also be fair the Haast's eagle back, because these species have become extinct together.

Remembering that I didn't mentioned my favorite species, because I just included species that have been extinct recently.

 

I figured I would put down the five recently extinct species I would like to see:

5. Sardinian pika Prolagus sardus - The largest pika of modern times by quite a way, and also the only pika species to have survived climatic changes in Europe
4. St Helena giant earwig Labidura herculeana - Because if there were still giant earwigs around there would need to be more cloud forest, so the other beautiful invertebrates of St Helena would have a home
3. Grandidier's giant tortoise Aldabrachelys grandidieri - Giant tortoises are crucial seed dispersers in the Madagascar forest, and the landscape is a much poorer place without them
2. Marcano's solenodon Solenodon marcanoi - Perhaps the main point of interest with this species would be its ecological relationship with the larger Hispaniolan solenodon
1. Great auk Pinguinus impennis - One of the largest seabirds of the North Atlantic, the first bird to be referred to as a penguin and a former British native

I have also included five older species, from the Plio-Pleistocene that I think would be interesting:

5. Australian giant flamingo Phoeniconotius eyrensis - A giant and more terrestrial flamingo; I think they would look brilliant on Lake Eyre dwarfing the other waterbirds
4. Merck's rhinoceros Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis - If nothing else, it would be interesting to observe how these rhinos interacted with native European vegetation
3. Clubbed-wing ibis Xenicibis xympithecus - Because its an ibis with thickened wing-bones that it possibly used to club seven bells out of each other - what's not to like?
2. European giant viper Laophis crotaloides - The only non-Pleistocene species; a viper that was as long as a large boa constrictor and possibly the largest venomous snake ever
1. Asian giant pangolin Manis palaeojavanica - Because pangolins are awesome at the best of times, so scaling one up to the size of a man makes it considerably more awesome

 

I'm sorry, it was a typo. Maybe when I was translating.

 

I could also include ground sloths and glyptodonts, but I'm not sure if they really would come extinct if not by humans.

 

Not entirely sure about megatherium but glyptodonts did not go extinct because of humans. They went extinct because there grassland and marsh habitats were taken over by the Amazon rainforest.