Ever heard of the giant sloth?

It lived in South, Central and North America, weighed six tons and, standing on its hind legs, would have towered over a T-Rex.

It became extinct eleven to eight thousand years ago.

The Koalalemur was about the size of a human teenager and lasted longer.

It existed exclusively in Madagascar until 1500, after which it no longer existed.

Both species share their fate with the tarpan and the Cape Verdean giant skink, the dodo and the ivory woodpecker, the pouch wolf and the Bengali Java rhinoceros.

The destruction of the habitat and intensive hunting have put an end to the animals.

And it goes on unchecked.

We are currently in the sixth mass extinction in which many species will disappear forever in a relatively short period of time.

Kai Spanke

Editor in the features section.

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The biologist Bernhard Kegel takes these losses as an opportunity to provide information about major extinction events in his new book and to dedicate a portrait to fifty species that have disappeared.

So that we can get an idea of ​​what we are talking about, the texts are flanked by historical representations - including works by well-known painters such as John James Audubon and John Gould.

The volume gathers almost only animals that humans have met, which usually ended badly.

According to Kegel, there is no known species that would have become extinct in the past five hundred to a thousand years only for “natural” reasons, that is, without our help.

But even before humans appeared, the earth was a dangerous place. In a mass extinction two hundred and fifty million years ago, it wiped out ninety-five percent of all animal and plant species of that time. A turning point between Permian and Triassic, which marks the end of the ancient world. After the ten-kilometer-long asteroid, which was the doom of the dinosaurs, struck what is now Mexico, two-thirds of all bird and mammal families were done for. No land animal larger than a cat survived the disaster.

However, there is good news too.

According to a 2011 study, over three hundred and fifty species of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles believed to be extinct have been recovered in the past one hundred and twenty years.

So it can hardly be said with certainty that an animal species has become extinct.

Who can search the furthest corners of all oceans, deserts and rainforests for the supposedly last representative of a species?

For the majority of species, life expectancy is a few million years.

So humans still have a long way to go.

One would rather not think about what that could mean for nature.

Bernhard Kegel: "Extinct Animals".

Dumont Verlag, Cologne 2021. 160 pp., Ill., Hardcover, 25, - €.