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A lost Menagerie: during the past 500 years, countless animal species have gone extinct, some to loud lamentation, others to little notice. Now the art and words of two men have brought to life dozens of the lost creatures, including this sampling—three mammals, a bird, and a reptile—that once lived in Australia and New Zealand

Natural History, Nov, 2001 by Tim Flannery

It may seem a soul-destroying task to set about documenting, in words and pictures, the creatures that have perished in the past 500 years, but this project is one of the most exciting I have ever been involved in. That's because it has allowed me to glimpse, in my imagination at least, a tiny flicker of the wonder of this lost world. Over the four years of the project, my collaborator, Peter Schouten, created 103 life-size paintings. Each was a voyage of discovery: even photographs don't exist for most species we studied, and the few that are available are reproduced in black-and-white.

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Because it was essential that Peter's images be as accurate as possible, we both made numerous trips to museums. There we would photograph, sketch, and take notes on the faded and distorted specimens. These records, along with other people's written accounts and sketches drawn from life, constituted our reference materials. On occasion, I would find myself descending into the vault of a European museum where rare and valuable specimens are housed. There a curator would unlock a cabinet and open a drawer to reveal, for instance, a stuffed bird skin that the great Captain James Cook himself had seen, the sole example of an entire species. On one memorable occasion at the University of Oxford, the famous head of a dodo (the only one left) was placed reverently in my hands; on another, I peered through an alcohol-filled jar at the sad remnants of a long-extinct fruit bat. To see or touch such specimens seemed to put me in direct contact with a rich, now vanished world.

Greater Short-Tailed Bat (Mystacina robusta)

Last record: April 1965. Distribution: prehistorically, North and South Islands, New Zealand; historically, small islands off Stewart Island, New Zealand.

New Zealand was home to only three land mammals before the arrival of the Maori, and all were bats. Two species belonged to a unique New Zealand bat family, of which the greater short-tailed bat was the larger member.

Short-tailed bats are the only bats as adept at scrambling along the ground as they are at flying. They have pouches on the sides of their bodies for their wings to fold into. With their wings hidden away, they can race through burrows or scrub with the alacrity of shrews and mice.

In historic times, greater short-tailed bats were known only from one dubious South Island record and from colonies on several small islands off Stewart Island in the far south. There the bats used the burrows of seabirds as roosts. They flew slowly, never rising more than ten feet off the ground. They fed on nectar from flowering plants and were probably also partly carnivorous, hunting nestlings as well as scavenging fat and meat from mutton-birds caught and left out to dry overnight.

The very last refuges of these bats were on Solomon and Big South Cape Islands, which remained rat-free up to a remarkably late date. The bats thrived there as recently as 1962 or 1963, until the arrival of black rats aboard fishing vessels.

Pig-Footed Bandicoot (Chaeropus ecaudatus)

Last record: 1901. Distribution: inland Australia.

The pig-footed bandicoot was one of the very strangest of marsupials. The size of a kitten, it had long, slender limbs, with each hind foot bearing a single, elongated toe like a tiny horse's hoof, and each forefoot bearing two digits that resembled miniature cloven hoofs. It had a peculiar gait, being likened by a nineteenth-century naturalist to "a broken-down hack in a canter, apparently dragging the hindquarters after it."

Pig-footed bandicoots were never common, although the species was rather widespread. They appear to have been principally vegetarian, taking grass seeds in the wild, although in captivity they ate lettuce, bulbs, and grasshoppers. By day they sheltered in a grass nest, from which they emerged in the evening to feed.

Gerard Krefft, a member of the 1856-57 Blandowski expedition to the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers, brought along a drawing of a specimen to show Aborigines that this was the animal he was eager to procure. Unfortunately, the only drawing he could obtain was of a specimen that had lost its tail, and his Aboriginal helpers brought him any number of common bandicoots with their tails removed. Eventually they arrived with two living pig-footed bandicoots. Krefft, who was on short rations, studied them for some time before he killed one and ate it. He recorded that "they are very good eating, and I am sorry to say that my appetite more than once overruled my love for science."

The Australian nation came into existence through federation in 1901, the same year that the last pig-footed bandicoot specimen was secured. Interviews with Aborigines living in remote regions, however, suggest that the species survived long after this, finally becoming extinct in the western desert as late as the 1950s. Just which factors--the changed fire regime; the introduction of foxes, cattle, sheep, and cats--were responsible for the extinction of this strange creature remains unclear.

Natural History, Nov, 2001 by Tim Flannery

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