Animals become extinct for a variety of reasons. While the Lyall’s wren was widespread in all of New Zealand prehistorically, it became extinct when the Maori settled on the island and introduced the Polynesian rat and other non-native animals which preyed on the birds. It could have been within a single year, but it was certainly not much more than a few years after Lyall and the other lighthouse keepers first made their way to Stephens Island that the wren disappeared. While debated hotly by scientists, the dodo became extinct for three reasons. Like all of the islands of the region, Stephens Island has short, craggy, and almost impenetrable vegetation, likely because the land is guilty of trying to stop the strong and persistent southeasterly winds sweeping in from the Antarctic Continent. He was literate, fit, and orderly, but, most important, he could keep a paraffin lantern burning cleanly. The cat had eaten the first and last of the species, and all the others in between. He was also eager to pursue his passions, even if doing so meant life on an isolated island. The largest ape to roam Earth died out 100,000 years ago because it failed to tuck into savannah grass after climate change hit its preferred diet of forest fruit, scientists suggest. This made them the most desirable animal for the hunting purpose, among such people. Over time Tibbles probably became more and more wild. New Zealand itself is a nation of islands, an archipelago made up of two large landmasses, the South Island and the North Island, surrounded by an array of smaller islands and all isolated from the rest of the world for over 80 million years. Once the prey is immobilized, cats inflict the kill bite with two sharp canines, usually to the neck, and quickly begin tearing into scales, fur, or feathers. The term Biological Species Concept, coined by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, defines a species as a group of individuals that can potentially interbreed in nature. David Lyall describes the situation in a letter to the mainland in 1895: “…the cats have become wild and are making sad havoc among the birds…”. Yep, the Stephen Island Wren, a small flightless bird native to a small island off the coast of New Zealand, was eradicated by a solitary housecat with a stupid name. The disputed subspecies orii, the Daito wren, became extinct around 1940 – if it was indeed a valid taxon and not merely based on an anomaly. Dodos lived on Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. We do occasionally know the exact moment when a species shuffled off this mortal coil: the last surviving Stephen's Island wren was brought in by the lighthouse-keeper's cat, Tibbles, in 1894. It reminded Lyall of the Rifleman (Acanthisitta chloris), a similar species of small “wren” common in New Zealand and one he knew quite well. Thus in Scotland , in addition to the typical bird T. t. indigenus , there are three distinct insular subspecies: one, T. t. hirtensis , is confined to the island … The dodo was a large flightless bird was native to the Island of Mauritius (located to the east of Africa and Madagascar). Does a Wren have feathers? Some accounts even suggest the wren was semi-nocturnal. The Seychelles parakeet became extinct due to intense hunting pressure and they are believed to be already gone by 1893. It flapped its vestigial wings to help on the occasional long jump—perhaps its closest approximation to flight. Lyall was not daunted by these challenges. Taxonomists and systematists look at the color, patterns, size, and now the genes themselves to decide whether an animal might actually be a species new to science. 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