I’ve searched before but I’ve never managed to find a complete list of all known animal species that have gone extinct since modern humans started spreading across the planet, so I decided to make one myself: https://recent-extinctions.fandom.com/wiki/Island_Taxa
I’ve always found the IUCN red list with its arbitrary cut-off date of 1500AD woefully misrepresentative, as it omits the majority of human-induced extinctions, many of which took place long ago. I feel this leads to an incomplete view of what our ecosystems would’ve looked like in their ‘pristine’ state. For example, we’ve already lost at least 21 species of elephants which together had a range spanning practically the entire globe with the exception of Australia.
I’m currently working on completing the list with all the island endemics, focusing on birds, reptiles and mammals. When this list is complete I’ll move on to the next one and try to find and add all the mainland birds, reptiles and mammals.
I’m posting this so that anyone with an interest can check out the list, but I could use some help as well! Do you notice any species that are missing from the list? I still have to add most of the Caribbean rodents, I’ll be adding those later today, but am I missing anything else? I’d love to hear it, or, since it’s a wiki, you can edit the page yourself as well!
If you see any species on the list that are no longer valid, I’d love to hear that as well.
And if anyone does know of a full list that already exists which makes any further effort on this wasted, I’d love to hear that as well. :)