Memorial for the Ones We've Lost

For all the species on this planet that have vanished recently, due to unchecked growth, commodification, climate change or their intentional destruction. Grief is important; it is how we remember and move forward, it is how we make change.  

[olowan-waphiya]

Dear Colorado Wildlife Alliance advocates,

The time is approaching–the CPW Commission meeting is only two weeks away, March 4-5. We’ve seen what the opposition is planning and Colorado’s “furbearering” wildlife needs you.

Please join us in one week for our Zoom planning meeting. Details provided below: 

Date & Time: Feb 25, 2026 06:00 PM Mountain Time

Zoom Meeting Link: https://biologicaldiversity-org.zoom.us/j/86481039995?pwd=B8jKbE80LQivF3VnQUAxYaypV8OFQe.1

In this meeting we will discuss actions needed in advance of the CPW meeting, messaging and planning for the actual meeting March 4-5.

Critically, we need as many CWA members and friends to attend the CPW Commission meetings. We know the opposition is trying to get those supporting unlimited killing and outdated wildlife management there in force. We need as many of us at these meetings as possible to show the Commission that we are not a vocal minority but an activated majority. 

March 4 will be the day for the “furbearer” management reform petition. Arrive early, by 7am, and plan for the day. And please wear something RED so we can create a visual presence and so we can find each other more easily.

March 5 will be focused on wolf management and SB26-003 Implementation. Again, please arrive early, wear RED and plan for the day.

The CPW Commission meetings will be held at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Denver - Westminster, 8773 Yates Dr. Westminster, CO 80031

We’ll discuss all this on next Wednesday’s Zoom meeting.

We thank you–Colorado’s “furbearers” thank you–for everything you’ve done these past several weeks. Now is the time to dig a little deeper for the wild animals with whom we share our Colorado home.

[mourningkite]

I want them back :(

[amnhnyc]

🔍 In September of 1914, Martha, the last-known living Passenger Pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her death at age 29 after a lifetime in captivity marked the disappearance of her once-abundant species from the world—and made Passenger Pigeons synonymous with the extinction of species at human hands.

But what happened? Step into the Museum’s Ornithology Collections to learn more.

[goldiesmess]

The Ones We Lost

Labrador duck Great Auk

Caribbean monk seal Baiji

Sea mink Spectacled cormorant

[jadafitch]

Day 28 of Avian August 2025, Birds of Hawaii, hosted by @cookiedoves: ʻUla-ʻai-hāwane (Ciridops anna)

ʻUla-ʻai-hāwane was a member of the Hawaiian honeycreepers but sadly disappeared in 1892. The name ʻula-ʻai-hāwane means "red bird that eats hāwane" (the fruit of the loulu palm) in Hawaiian. Its diet primarily consisted of the flowers, seeds, unripe fruits, and insects associated with several species of loulu palms (Pritchardia).

The relationship between the honeycreeper and these palms was a delicate one. The Hawaiian pritchardia (Pritchardia affinis) is now critically endangered, largely due to introduced pigs and rats that destroy young plants. The number of surviving palms was not sufficient to support the ʻula-ʻai-hāwane, which depended on them.

[esotericepistemology-deactivate]

"We are currently living through a mass extinction event. Scientists at the University of Zurich found that the current rates of animals and plants going extinct are between 100 and 1000 times greater than pre-human levels."

A Surprising Number of Animals Are Returning from Extinction

Earth’s biodiversity howls from beyond the grave

[gardenstatetait]

Permafrost mummies! All these creatures represent a real animal found preserved in the permafrost. There's something so fragile and special about the earth and ice reuniting us with an animal our ancestors would have been so familiar with, that shit makes me cry.

[iravaid]

Visit Original Link

On conservation and survival

[iravaid]

From a project I was working on before going in another direction, but still wanted to post this. Inspired by this photo of mourning doves nesting in the fossil of a triceratops, and how it tells us that the world can end, just not forever.

[bonnettbee]

EXTINCT STICKY NOTE FRIENDS MASTERPOST because I can’t find what I tagged all of these fellas with when I posted them the first time ;w;

The first of these go all the way back to 2020, when I started at my current office job and needed colors in my cubicle that weren’t just Greige (Grey-Beige); these were almost exclusively drawn from memory, and a lot of them are pretty doofy as a result. Others I took a bit of creative liberty on. Proportions and perspective tend to be weird on most of these… but they all still ended up holding a special place in my heart. ^w^

Pt. 1

[bonnettbee]

Pt. 2

[bonnettbee]

Pt. 3

[bonnettbee]

Pt. 4, these are the last of the ones I’ve done so far! I’ll add any more that I do to this post. :3

[bonnettbee]

Update/Pt. 5: A VERY good noodle, I can never see anything about these funny little guys without laughing so hard I almost cry 😂

You have no idea how hard it was not to draw him some little snake pants for his doofy little snake legs.

[bonnettbee]

THE POLL HAS SPOKEN! HECKHANDS MCMEGADUCK IS THE FIRST EXTINCT FRIEND ON THE WALL IN 2024!!! :D

[bonnettbee]

@a-book-of-creatures here are all of the suggestions I had time for today before I had to lock up… sadly, Mr. Moa might have to wait until next time I have a gap in my schedule, and I frankly have no idea why I made some of the color choices I did (other than your red-white-and-purple Archie-boi and the exquisite opportunity you gave me to make an ancient squid wizard, of course), but I hope you enjoy them regardless! :3

[bonnettbee]

Another batch of friends! Including the last of @a-book-of-creatures ‘s most recent suggestions (whose experimental color blending… uh… did NOT go according to plan, lessons were definitely learned there >.>’), a VERY plush and friendly request from my cousin, a big heckin boofer - the BIGGEST heckin boofer known to science at the time of writing, in fact - and two Funny Little Guys™️ from the Triassic!

I’m slowly running out of usable room on my current cubicle wall, but I still REALLY want to try and find a way to cram more friends in there before actual work picks back up again, so stay tuned and feel free to let me know in my dms or on this post who else you all might want to see join the party! :D

[bonnettbee]

Things have picked back up at work a bit, so I’ve had less time… but I wanted to share a momentous occasion: the first ever Extinct Sticky Note Friends two-for-one! Based on that lovely little fossil of these two sharing a burrow that was making the rounds a while ago. 🥰

Since we don’t know if Thrinaxodon was fluffy or not, I decided to split the difference and give him a sort of “cape” or “crest” of some kind of fur-like integument on top, and let him be a little bit more ambiguously-textured on the bottom? Kinda helps break up the silhouette a bit, I like how he turned out and the fluffy crest seems like a comfy place for his little Broomistega buddy!

In my heart, these little guys come from a universe where they didn’t die together and fossilize, and got to keep being friends and live long and happy lives together. Maybe they could even become the time-traveling paleo protagonists of a children’s cartoon or something. 😅

[bonnettbee]

Finally, an update to this masterpost, and to the wall! :D

Bit of a charming story behind this one too.

My Boss’s Boss (name redacted here for privacy) is retiring on Friday, so I asked him if he wanted me to put an extinct friend of his choice on the wall in his honor.

He is a lifelong sport fisherman, and asked me if I had any information on whether there were ever any “dinosaur salmon” - I suggested ol O. rastrosus here, mentioning that they had Saber Teeth and could get 6-8 ft long according to some estimates; he was absolutely GIDDY at that revelation, said he thought it was a shame he’d missed them by a few million years, and mused to another Grandpa-Aged coworker over how you’d go about landing and cooking a salmon that big and whether it would be any good to eat at that size.

He was a nice guy, I’ll miss him, and I’m happy I was able to make him smile before he retires with my own “Big Fish Story.” 😁

[bonnettbee]

Another new one… redid this guy a couple times, wasn’t thrilled with the coloring on any of them (wanted to go for kind of a tapir pattern but idk if it worked) but I didn’t wanna draw him again. ;w;

I’m also not sure if the pose is even SLIGHTLY correct, ref images are all over the place and I had to take a few creative liberties to get him to fit on a sticky note, but I hope I at least got the idea across? These are such goofy little guys that I had to have one on my wall, maybe I’ll try another pass at one with better colors another time. 😅

[bonnettbee]

Update: our first friend of 2025! Another person retiring from the company asked me for this one (name redacted for privacy), as apparently it’s one of their kid’s old favorites. I saw that a lot of modern stego reconstructions give them kind of staggered plates instead of straight-up pairs, so I went with that… hopefully that’s actually how they were, because it’s MUCH easier to draw them this way! Not sure if I got the number of plates right, though, I forgot to count. ^_^’

[bonnettbee]

Ok so TWO UPDATES IN ONE DAY, with many more than two dinosaurs! A couple of other coworkers, seeing the Stegosaurus, requested another set of “All-Stars” for the wall; one wanted a T. rex, the other wanted a Velociraptor.

The rexes sadly turned into a bit of a disaster coloring-wise, but hopefully he likes them anyway? I went with the increasingly popular “Downy Baby, Bald or Mostly-Bald Adult” Interpretation here, and the mostly illegible “fun fact” is related to that. At least the poses are still pretty cute, ruinous attempts to fix coloring mistakes aside.

The person who wanted Velociraptor is also getting a bonus Protoceratops, because I’ve been meaning to draw these two fighting in reference to the famous fossil for a while now, and I actually really like how the poses turned out! I think it was @strange-kaleidoscope who once said they liked that my extinct creatures were always happy.. I apologize for letting you down in that regard this time, friend, but I hope the cool battle stances make up for it at least? 😅

[mat966]

I found this interesting high quality zoomed out version of a iconic thylacine photo

[art-and-things-of-beauty]

Two portraits of the male Pink-headed duck by Dick van den Brakel.

(oil on canvasboard 20 x 16,5 cm - waterc. 22 x 18 cm)

The pink-headed duck (Rhodonessa caryophyllacea) was (or is) a large diving duck that was once found in parts of the Gangetic plains of India, Bangladesh and in the riverine swamps of Myanmar but feared extinct since the 1950s. Numerous searches have failed to provide any proof of continued existence. It has been suggested that it may exist in the inaccessible swamp regions of northern Myanmar and some sight reports from that region have led to its status being declared as “Critically Endangered” rather than extinct.  

Two photo’s of a pair Pink-headed ducks made ca. 1925 by David Seth-Smith.

[eeios]

First Dinoël posting ! Those are illustrations i made for my first creator's market, centered around dinos and popular science ...

The Thylacine, or tasmanian tiger, is an extinct marsupial from Australia. For the frame, i was inspired by aboriginal art.

The Quagga was a species of zebra from South Africa.

[theonesthathavegone]

a postcard to all extinct species:

we’re sorry. we still love you and think of you.

wish you were here.

[scidotnews]

Paleontologists Find New Fossils of Gigantic Freshwater Turtle

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/stupendemys-geographicus-shells-08131.html

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

*dies trying to help this cross the road*

[otahkoapisiakii]

…”See the Turtle of enormous girth..”

[olowan-waphiya]

“The Herd on the Move”—William Jacob Hays.

This painting simultaneously breaks my heart and fills me with awe and hope. When people speak about how prevalent the bison were across Turtle Island I’m not sure if it fully HITS just how many were slaughtered, how much this land relied on them for proper ecological balance….

if we want our land to thrive, if we want the next seven generations to survive then we must help the bison (and the indigenous peoples who love/rely on them) to expand and grow until they are once again found all across the land.

[dont-look-for-me-im-not-here-de]

I wonder if this contributed to the dust bowl?

[olowan-waphiya]

@realbadatpoker Oh, absolutely! Take away the keystone species and the ecology begins to collapse.*

For anyone interested, the book 'Down to Earth; Nature's Role in American History' by Ted Steinberg is a really great resource. He discusses at length the role bison had on the continent's ecology and the many variables that contributed to their near extinction.

*i.e. people wanted cows...familiar to colonists and not as likely to kill you. cows tear out the roots of the grass where bison do not--bison also do a ton of other things that lead to them being called 'ecosystem engineers'. the cows tore up the prairies and left no vegetation behind. just one tiny way this contributed.

[great-and-small]

Reached out to a biologist to request some info about an extinct species of freshwater shrimp and the email she sent in response was not only lovely and helpful but also kind of poetry to me? People who study invertebrates are actually the most hopeful and compassionate scientists that we have.