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Member. Page added on August 10, 2012 I mourn for the dodo, poor
fat flightless bird, extinct since the eighteenth century. I
grieve for the great auk, virtually wiped out by zealous Viking
huntsmen a thousand years ago and finished off by hungry
Greenlanders around 1760. I think the world would be more
interesting if such extinct creatures as the moa, the giant
ground sloth, the passenger pigeon, and the quagga still moved
among us. It surely would be a lively place if we had a few
tyrannosaurs or brontosaurs on hand. (Though not in my
neighborhood, please.) And I’d find it great fun to watch one of
those PBS nature documentaries showing the migratory habits of
the woolly mammoth. They’re all gone, though, along with the
speckled cormorant, Steller’s sea cow, the Hispaniola hutia, the
aurochs, the Irish elk, and all too many other species. But now
comes word that it isn’t just wildlife