10 extinct animals that our ancestors knew and 10 that went extinct before our time

The woolly mammoth has a prehistoric look, like the ones on movie posters, but some survived for a surprisingly long time. Small island populations still existed thousands of years after the end of the Ice Age, close enough to human civilization that this timeline seems a bit strange. They weren’t just creatures depicted in cave paintings; for some people, they were very real animals.

The dodo has been mocked for so long that it’s easy to forget it was a real bird that had a real habitat. It lived on the island of Mauritius, where it had no reason to fear humans, ships, rats, pigs, or the sudden arrival of a very different world. By the end of the 17th century, it had disappeared.

The thylacine, often called the “Tasmanian tiger,” seemed to be a cross between a dog, a marsupial, and a striped shrew. The last known specimen died in captivity in 1936—which is recent enough to make us feel uneasy. There are people whose grandparents lived at a time when it still existed.

In the past, migratory pigeons roamed North America in such great numbers that they could darken the sky. Then, hunting, habitat destruction, and human consumption decimated this population at a staggering rate. The last known passenger pigeon died in 1914, turning a species that once numbered in the millions into nothing more than a name in a museum.

The great auk was a flightless seabird of the North Atlantic, whose appearance was somewhat reminiscent of a penguin, but which lived in a very different world. Humans hunted it for its meat, feathers, oil, and, later, to make specimens. The last known breeding pair was killed in the 1840s—a sentence that’s hard to read without pausing.

The Steller’s sea cow was enormous, slow, and docile—a combination that proved disastrous as soon as humans discovered it. It lived in the cold northern waters and fed on kelp, like a peaceful giant floating on the surface. Just a few decades after it was first described by Europeans, it had been hunted to extinction.

The quagga looked as if someone had started painting zebra stripes on it but got bored halfway through. It lived in southern Africa and was the victim of intensive hunting during European colonization. The last known quagga died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883, a time close enough to the dawn of photography that it almost feels as though we could reach out and touch it.

The aurochs was the wild ancestor of domestic cattle, but it was not simply a hardier cow. It was larger, more ferocious, and impressive enough to feature in ancient art and folklore. The last known aurochs died in Poland in the 17th century, after a long decline from the forests and grasslands.

Moas were giant, flightless birds native to New Zealand; some species were larger than a human. They had no wings at all, not even small, decorative ones. After humans arrived, hunting and ecological changes led to their extinction in the space of just a few centuries.

The Madagascar elephant bird was another giant that made ostriches look like dwarfs. Its eggs were enormous—the kind of thing that seems made up until you see one in a museum. Humans most certainly lived alongside it before it went extinct, leaving behind bones, eggshells, and the unsettling feeling that giants haven’t always been figments of the imagination.

Here are ten species from the other side of the divide. These were neither dinosaurs nor prehistoric sea monsters, but animals we can almost recognize—creatures that vanished before they could become part of our collective memory.

The saber-toothed tiger was not actually a tiger, even though that nickname has stuck. It was a powerful ambush predator, with long, curved canines and a build that made it look more like a wrestler than a runner. By the end of the Ice Age, it had become extinct.

The American lion was more imposing than the lions we know today—and that’s already hard to beat. It roamed parts of North America during the Ice Age, hunting in an environment populated by horses, camels, bison, and mammoths. Then the climate warmed, its prey changed, and this gigantic feline went extinct.

The giant wolf seems straight out of a fantasy tale, but it really did exist. Stockier than the gray wolf, it was adapted to a harsher, more hostile environment. For thousands of years, it roamed the Americas before becoming extinct toward the end of the Pleistocene.

The giant ground sloth takes the silhouette of a familiar animal and transforms it into an almost unbelievable creature. Some species were large enough to exceed the height of a man, equipped with enormous claws that they used to tear off branches, dig, or defend themselves. It was not the sleepy sloth clinging to trees that we imagine today; it was a slow-moving giant that truly commanded respect.

The short-snouted bear was one of the most fearsome mammals in North America during the Ice Age. It stood upright, moved on long limbs, and seemed built to travel long distances. Modern bears are impressive enough, but this one seems like it came from a world where everything was taken to the extreme.

The woolly rhinoceros resembled a modern rhinoceros, ready to face extreme weather conditions. It had a thick coat, a massive body, and large horns adapted to vast, frozen expanses. Ancient peoples may not have known it as a fossil, but as a living animal thriving in a harsh, frozen world.

The Irish moose wasn’t really a moose in the American sense of the word, but the name has a certain old-fashioned charm. Its antlers were gigantic, spanning a width greater than that of a small car. Even today, its skeleton looks almost artificial, as if nature had gotten carried away.

The American cheetah was not the same animal as the one found on the African plains, but it seems to have played a similar role. It was fast, slender, and perfectly adapted to wide-open spaces. Its extinction might even explain why American antelopes are still so incredibly fast today, as if they were fleeing a predator that no longer exists.

This giant beaver wasn’t just an ordinary beaver scaled up for comic effect. It could grow to the size of a black bear, with enormous teeth and a body adapted to wetlands—very different from our own. It’s strange to imagine a creature that’s both so familiar and so out of place making its way through the reeds.

The teratorn was a gigantic bird, larger than any vulture most people will ever have the chance to see flying overhead. It soared over ancient landscapes, carried by updrafts, above animals that have also disappeared today. A sky filled with teratorns would still look like our sky, but less docile.