8 Animals That Recently Went Extinct

There’s a word for the final remaining member of a species: endling, which was suggested in a letter written to Nature in 1996. “An orphan is someone, usually a child, with no living parents. A foundling is someone, usually an abandoned baby, with no known parents. We do not have one word to describe the last person surviving or deceased in a family line, or the last survivor of a species,” the authors wrote. They felt endling was appropriate because “end- has several meanings, including ‘extinction’ and ‘finish, concluding part’; -ling is a suffix added to denote ‘connected with the primary noun’ but also includes line and lineage.”

In this episode of The List Show, host and Mental Floss editor-in-chief Erin McCarthy talks about a few endlings. There are so many animals that have gone extinct through the ages that we’re choosing to focus just on creatures that went extinct relatively recently: from 1800 onward. So even though we’ll be talking about animals that went the way of the dodo, we won’t be talking about the dodo itself, which, incidentally, went extinct in the late 17th century. Check out the video below.

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