Favourite extinct animal?

[Dionysos]

Do you have a favourite animal which is now extinct? I'm thinking prehistoric, but you can include recently extinct animals if you like too.

This was originally going to be a favourite dinosaur thread, but I figured some people might like to also include animals such as flying reptiles (pterosaurs), marine reptiles (like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, or ichthyosaurs), or some people might like synapsids, mammals (such as the earliest mammals, or later mammalian megafauna, etc), or even prehistoric insects and arachnids... Plus anything else you may consider!

Do you have a clear favourite? If you cannot choose one, list several!


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Myself:
For dinosaurs I really love ceratopsids in general (the triceratops being the most iconic and obvious examples, but there were some really cute smaller ceratopsids too like protoceratops which may have inspired the myth of the griffin).

But I really cannot narrow favourites down to a single dinosaur. I also love theropods, sauropods, and pretty much any branch of dinosaur for completely different reasons.

They were such a diverse and successful group of animals.

A special shoutout goes to incisivosaurus because it appears to have been a rather lovely-looking buck-toothed theropod dinosaur!

For pterosaurs I'll probably have to say Quetzalcoatlus because of its enormous size. On the ground with its wings tucked in it was pretty much the size of a giraffe, and to think that thing could lift itself off the earth and fly?

For prehistoric mammals I really like the so-called 'Hell Pig' / 'Terminator Pig' or Entelodont too. A pig-like carnivore (though not actually a pig) living in the middle Eocene - early Miocene. My reasons for liking these animals is because they could make good horror stories, not because I'd like to have been anywhere near them. Nor do I find them aesthetically pleasing...


I might have to come back to give more examples another day.


Does anyone else have prehistoric / extinct creatures they'd like to list? Maybe you have good paleoart of them?

 

[Jake]

Thylacine (or Tasmanian Tiger)

Maybe a little biased because I live in Tasmania, haha. But see, it's an amazing looking animal. Unfortunately they were aggressively hunted by early European settlers here and finally faced extinction in the 1930s. Which makes me so angry. But you know.

You still occasionally hear about random unconfirmed sightings in the wild but officially they're all gone.

 

[Gabranth]

Passenger Pigeon

There were about 4 billion of these birds all over North America just a few hundred years ago; however a combination of large scale hunting, and deforestation saw them die out pretty quickly. The last recorded pigeon was in 1914 whilst in captivity.

Before the arrival of the Europeans, the pigeon was able to co-exist with the native Americans due to to the girdling and tending to trees that produced nuts, which the pigeons enjoyed as food. As soon as the mass deforestation which started in the 18th century, they had to seek out other habitats.

 

[sly]

The Aurochs.

It's an elephant sized cow. This is interesting because for some reason, they're trying to bring them back. They got progressively smaller as the weather warmed and they were domesticated. The last died in the 1600s.

 

[Miko]

Compsognathus

Compsognathus is a genus of small, bipedal, carnivorous theropod dinosaur. Members of its single species Compsognathus longipes could grow to around the size of a turkey. They lived about 150 million years ago, during the Tithonian age of the late Jurassic period, in what is now Europe.

I want a compy, I'll name him chompy, together we'll be all stompy-stompy!

Seriously though, I love those little dudes. So tiny and cute, I wonder if they were actually that tiny!



Dire Wolves & Sabertooths were pretty cool too. Though dinosaurs~ in general are awesome. Real fan of the Vilociraptors as well! Looking forward to when we'll all be able to go out in public safely again one day and take my kid to a Dino museum

 

[Linnaete]

The Piplup in me would like to nominate these flightless fellas.

Wark! The great auk. You can kind of describe them as something visually resembling a penguin and a large duck. They used to forage the waters of the North Atlantic and were obviously known by humans long before the first recorded explorer initially laid eyes on the Antarctic creatures we currently refer to as penguins. That's right, Pingu's brethren were named after the great auk's genus "Pinguinus" because of the resemblance.

Because human beings are only good at destroying the natural world and hunting majestic creatures to extinction (in this case it was the meat and body oil), the great auk is now sadly no longer with us, and the last remaining pair of their kind was suspected to have been killed in 1844 near Iceland.

Rest in peace, majestic Northern duck penguin.