Mobile Meat Machines

Author notes

Hungry Hungry Humans

Davy_Malay

on Jan. 16, 2009

It seems pretty amazing that it's actually possible to hunt an entire species into extinction, but we have managed to do it with depressing regularity.
Like it or not, since we got on the scene, there has been a huge huge spike in the extinction rates.
You have to wonder, or at least I do, about all those previous mass extinctions that are scattered through the fossil record. Meteors, pandemics, super volcanoes, yeah, maybe - or maybe one animal just happened to become horribly more efficient than all the others around it, and ate itself a swathe of destruction across the world for a few thousand years, before running out of stuff to chomp on and quietly dying out. There are big old gaps in the fossil record - we have sample of only a few percent of everything that ever was. I reckon there's space in there for a few prehistoric intelligences.
The Stephens Island Wren was not actually killed by a single kitty, awesome a story as that it. It is just an urban legend. Or a rural one, maybe, with it having happened on a remote island and all. Wikipedia's got a pretty good article on them.
You know we barely even know what a dodo looks like? We have only a few paintings, some amateur sketches, and some "ossified relics". The owner of the museum that housed the last stuffed dodo decided it was getting a bit manky, and chucked it on a fire. Seriously.