Vanishing Animals: The Last Images of Extinct Animals
Author: Errol Fuller
Translator: He Bing
Edition: Chongqing University Press
May 2018
White-tipped dolphin
In Chinese history, the white-tipped dolphin has often appeared in poems, stories, legends, and academic manuscripts. But it wasn't until 1918 that it was officially named by the Western scientific community. By the first decades of the 20th century, white-tipped dolphins were still abundant. Subsequently, a variety of factors led to a rapid decrease in the number of white-tipped dolphins until they disappeared.
In February 1914, 17-year-old Charles Hoy and the white-tipped dolphin he killed, it was the remains of this white-tipped dolphin that gave the Western scientific community the first understanding of this species.
thylacine
The thylacine is one of the most famous mysterious animals in the world. It lives in Tasmania and, although it looks more like a striped dog or wolf, is a marsupial, similar to kangaroos and koalas.
A female thylacine and her cub (about 8 months old), in 1909, in Bomaris. The photographer is unknown.
Laughing owl
This is the only known photograph of this species taken in the wild. Photographed by brothers Cuthbert Parr and Oliver Parr at a cliff in South Canterbury, New Zealand.
Heather chicken
The last heather chicken, which admirers named "Ben Xingwang". Alfred P. O. Gross at "Martha's Vineyard", circa 1930.
Khao Island honey-sucking birds
Robert Schalenberg photographs a Kao Island honey-sucking bird in the Araki Swamp Wilderness in 1975, just a few years before the species went extinct. Robert was also one of the few people who had ever seen a live Khao Island honey-sucking bird.
Bliss Parrot
By Cyril M. H.H. Gerald's 1922 photograph of the Bliss Parrot in The Burnett River, Queensland, with its dim colours being a botched recreation of the beautiful feathers of a live bird. Many believe it still survives somewhere in Australia's vast interior, but the truth is that there is almost none.
The animals in these pictures have disappeared into history with all their compatriots, so the photographs become "physical evidence" that they have come to this world.
Because most of the photographs were taken in very difficult conditions in the early days of the invention of photography, the image quality is inevitably very poor, and there is not much detail. At the same time, most photographers didn't know how important their photographs would become at the time, as they didn't necessarily know that these species would most likely become extinct in the near future.
However, despite these downsides, these photos can still make us feel nostalgic and moved, they are so close at hand, almost within reach. But what comes alive in the photo is the last figure left by their own species on the earth.