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There are many hundreds, if not thousands. I'll start the list off, in no particular order, and hope others can add to it:

1. The Tasmanian tiger

2. The Passenger Pigeon

3. Aurochs Cattle of Europe

4. The Quagga Zebra

5. Atlas Bear of Africa

6. The Cape Lion

7. The Dodo bird of Mauritius

8. The Javan Tiger

9. The Great Auk

10. The Yangtze River Dolphin more…

To put another perspective on this, when humans reached North America 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, 15 entire genera of large mammal became extinct, hundreds of species of horse, mammoth, mastodon, big cat, camels and peccaries, giant condors, bears, pronghorn and sloths. Many believe that this was climate chanced induced but more and more evidence points to human exploitation and activities being the main instigator. Go back 60,000 - 40,000 years ago, massive extinctions of large bodied animals followed the arrival of humans in Australia and New Guinea and many more were finished off when the Europeans arrived just 200 years ago. Marsupial lions, giant kangaroos and wallabies, huge wombats and giant komodo dragons to name but a fraction. When the Maori first found New Zealand it was full of hundreds of species of flightless bird, including 13 species of the giant Moa, these were preyed upon by the giant Haast Eagle. Within a few hundred years they were all but gone. Madagascar and it's giant birds and lemurs suffered a similar fate.

During our expansion out of Africa over the last 100,000 years, we have probably caused unimaginable numbers of unique animals to slip into extinction. We often forget that these large animals probably had smaller symbiotic species that either lived on, in or around them. Kill the last giant ground sloth and with it goes all the parasites, bacteria and small animals that depended on it. The extinction of one animal can have a cascade effect across entire ecosystems.

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9y ago

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