Extinct Animals & Plants: Bizarre and Ancient Sea Animals

Extinct Animals & Plants
Animals and plants have lived on Earth for more

than two billion years. For most of that time they
existed as tiny, simple cells. Gradually, more
complicated forms of life developed and a huge
range of different animals and plants have lived
and died over the past 500 million years. So,
extinction is a natural part of evolution. Many
extinct forms of life have living relatives, but
others left no modern descendants at all.
BIZARRE AND ANCIENT SEA ANIMALS

Important 540-million-year-old fossils tell us a lot about
how complex animals began to evolve. The fossils come
from rocks called the Burgess Shale, in the early
Palaeozoic era. Among the strangest was Hallucigenia,
also known as velvet worm. Imagine an animal so weird
that scientists did not know which side was up and
which was down—or which was the front! There was no
other animal like it to help them decide. It had long legs
and long spines that looked very similar and, at first,
scientists had it upside down. Equally strange was
Anomalocaris, the first large predatory animal. It looked
something like a giant shrimp with big side flaps for
swimming. It was up to 1.8 metres long with huge
grasping limbs at the front and a ring of frighteningly
sharp teeth in its mouth. The best-known early sea
animals were the trilobites, ancient relatives of modern
arthropods (animals with no backbone). Some were
swimmers, but most lived on the sea bottom. Trilobites
existed for more than 350 million years. They lived all
over the world and there were several thousand
different species.
BACKBONED SEA ANIMALS

Many different backboned animals lived in ancient seas.
Huge armoured fishes were gradually replaced by more
modern-looking bony fishes. Sharks arose 400 million
years ago and they are still around today. Two groups of
air-breathing reptiles lived in the seas during the
Mesozoic era when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (about
200 million years ago). Ichthyosaurs were dolphin-
shaped and swam with powerful lobed tails. They
became extinct before their contemporaries, the
plesiosaurs. Plesiosaurs had barrel-shaped bodies and
swam using two pairs of paddles. The largest
ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs fed on other sea reptiles.
The smaller ones fed on fishes, or ammonites and
belemnites, extinct relatives of modern squids and
cuttlefish. The last big sea reptiles were mosasaurs,
lizards that went back to the sea. They were the top
predators of their time and died out at the same time as
the dinosaurs.
LIFE ON LAND
The dinosaurs are the group of land animals that existed
for longer than any other animal, including humans. The
last ones died out 65 million years ago. Long before the
dinosaurs appeared, about 200 million years ago, the
ancestors of modern amphibians and reptiles (lizards,
snakes and turtles) were established. They all evolved
alongside changing landscapes and plants. Huge tree-
sized horsetails (plants with needle-like leaves) and
lycopods (moss-like plants) grew in the coal swamps of
350-300 million years ago. They gave way to all kinds of
plants able to grow in drier conditions. Tall coniferous
trees, Ginkgo trees, cycads (palm-like plants) and ferns
provided food for the dinosaurs. Some of these plants
became extinct after flowering plants began to appear.
Flying reptiles—pterosaurs—dominated the skies over
the dinosaurs. The first bird, Archaeopteryx (Greek for
“ancient wing”) appeared 147 million years ago. Birds
are still all around us today but the last pterosaurs
became extinct along with the dinosaurs.
LIFE AFTER THE DINOSAURS

Mammals had scurried around the feet of the dinosaurs
for 150 million years. Most were mouse- or rat-sized
creatures. None was bigger than a domestic cat.
Mammals quickly filled the empty land left by the
dinosaurs. This is called the Cenozoic era in Earth’s
history. There were many strange mammals living
between 50 and 40 million years ago. None of them
were large. You would probably not have recognized the
earliest horse; it was only the size of a small dog. The
biggest land animals at that time were giant flightless
birds. Diatryma stood 2.1 metres tall, had a gigantic
beak and could have eaten any mammal. Phorusrhacos
(called the “terror bird”) lived slightly later and had a
beak like a meat hook.
The climate and plant life changed dramatically through

the second half of the Cenozoic era and with it the birds
and mammals. Mammals became more like modern
ones. Large grass-eaters evolved alongside grasses.
There were horses, camels, mammoths and bison. Big
sabre-toothed tigers were their main predators. During
the ice ages 40,000 to 5,000 years ago, woolly
mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and huge cave bears
roamed across Europe and North America. They all
became extinct when the climate began to warm up
again. By this time our own species, modern man, had
spread around the world. Man the hunter played a part
in the extinction of these animals too.
Huge flightless birds evolved on islands where they were

safe from predators. Safe until humans arrived, that is!
The Madagascan elephant bird, Aepyornis, was the
heaviest and laid the largest eggs. You could fit about
nine litres of water inside the shell. The dodo was the
first animal that we know for certain became extinct
because of humans. The dodo was a flightless bird that
lived on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. It was
discovered when sailors arrived there in 1600. The
sailors cut down the dodo’s forest home and their cats
and rats destroyed its nests. There was no escape for
the dodo because it could not fly. It became extinct less
than 80 years after it was first discovered. The great auk
(garefowl), a flightless relative of the puffin, used to live
around North Atlantic coasts. It was killed in vast
numbers for food and was extinct by 1850.
Did you know?
• The number of species dying out per year has risen dramatically since
the 1600s. If it continues to increase at the rate at which it is growing now,
50,000 species will become extinct each year.
• Once a species is extinct, it is gone forever. There are over 1,000

threatened species on Earth, all of which are in danger of extinction.
These include the mountain gorilla, the Siberian tiger and the whale shark.
• The extinction of a species can be caused by a number of different

factors. Often it is because humans destroy the species' natural
environment or hunt the species to death. Some species have suffered
mass extinction, like the dinosaurs, who may have died out all at once
when a large asteroid hit the Earth.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Extinct Animals & Plants

Animals and plants have lived on Earth for more

BIZARRE AND ANCIENT SEA ANIMALS

BACKBONED SEA ANIMALS

LIFE AFTER THE DINOSAURS

The climate and plant life changed dramatically through

Huge flightless birds evolved on islands where they were

Did you know?

• Once a species is extinct, it is gone forever. There are over 1,000

• The extinction of a species can be caused by a number of different

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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