Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Carl-E]

100 years ago today. 

September 1st, 1914.  Martha passed away quietly after a short illness at the Cincinnati zoo. 

The last of her species, her death marked the human extinction of the passenger pigeon.  As a result, squab is a much less common dish than it was 100 years ago...

[Akima]

The last Tasmanian Wolf died in Hobart Zoo in 1933. Hunted to extinction by Australian farmers and bounty-hunters, mainly. Though habitat destruction, and the introduction of competing feral dogs with accompanying distemper infection, were a factor too, the fact that the farming-interest-dominated government paid £1 per head bounty for adults and half that for pups in the 1880s shows how determined they were to wipe out the species. Tell me again that farmers make the best conservationists, and conservation laws are an unwarranted intrusion by sentimental urban elites...

On a lighter note, what a magnificent example of convergent evolution. How very much the Thylacine looked like a dog, and yet it was a marsupial whose family tree split from that leading to placental mammals like dogs many millions of years ago.