1. Chinese Paddlefish. Overfishing played a large role in the demise of this fish. The Chinese paddlefish, also known as the “Giant Chinese Sturgeon,” was declared extinct in 2022.
Sadly, that makes the splendid poison frog one of the most recently extinct animals on the planet. The small red frog, a species of poison dart frog, lived in the neo-tropical forests of Panama in the mountain ranges adjacent to Costa Rica.
The Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) is a critically endangered ape and an animal that could be extinct by 2050 unless deforestation and poaching are prevented. This intelligent herbivorous ape is a species of orangutan endemic to tropical and subtropical forests of Borneo.
— -- Icons of the wild — lions, tigers and other big cats — are fading from the world's wild places, warn conservation experts worldwide.
The rarest animal in the world is the vaquita (Phocoena sinus). It is a kind of critically endangered porpoise that only lives in the furthest north-western corner of the Gulf of California in Mexico. There are only 18 left in the world. It is thought that they may be extinct in ten years.
Only one living specimen of the tree species Madhuca diplostemon is known to exist.
Giant pandas are one of the rarest species on the planet. Once ranging for thousands of kilometers, fewer than 1,850 wild pandas remain today.
Another empirical method to study the likelihood of certain natural risks is to investigate the geological record. For example, a comet or asteroid impact event sufficient in scale to cause an impact winter that would cause human extinction before the year 2100 has been estimated at one-in-a-million.
Tigers are endangered: Tigers are among the most endangered species with an estimate of about 4,000 left in the wild.
The IUCN estimates that between 23,000 to 39,000 lions remain in the wild.
However, using information gathered by paleontologists and the history of evolution, it's been estimated that 99.9% of all species are extinct. That's not all of the species living here on the Planet today. It's actually of all the species who have lived on Earth at all.
The birds were first seen by Portuguese sailors about 1507 and were exterminated by humans and their introduced animals. The dodo was extinct by 1681, the Réunion solitaire by 1746, and the Rodrigues solitaire by about 1790.
The First Animals
Sponges were among the earliest animals. While chemical compounds from sponges are preserved in rocks as old as 700 million years, molecular evidence points to sponges developing even earlier.
In 2019 there were an estimated 150 South China tigers in captivity within China. 144 of these were part of the breeding and management program maintained by the Chinese Association of Zoological Gardens since 1994, five were in Guizhou province, and one was in Fujian province.
Current estimates indicate that there are more than 8,000 tigers being held in more than 200 centers in East and Southeast Asia, with roughly three-quarters of these tigers located in China.
Tiger numbers throughout much of Asia are on the rise. The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates between 3,726 and 5,578 tigers roam the continent.
Humans in the year 3000 will have a larger skull but, at the same time, a very small brain. "It's possible that we will develop thicker skulls, but if a scientific theory is to be believed, technology can also change the size of our brains," they write.
But how long can humans last? Eventually humans will go extinct. At the most wildly optimistic estimate, our species will last perhaps another billion years but end when the expanding envelope of the sun swells outward and heats the planet to a Venus-like state. But a billion years is a long time.
In the next 1,000 years, the amount of languages spoken on the planet are set to seriously diminish, and all that extra heat and UV radiation could see darker skin become an evolutionary advantage. And we're all set to get a whole lot taller and thinner, if we want to survive, that is.
The red panda
These cute creatures live in the Himalayan Mountains of Southwestern China and other high mountains. They spend most of their time in the trees. They use their long bushy tails for balance while climbing. They also curl up with it for the winter.
Leading pet types among pet owners in China 2019-2021
In 2021, cats surpassed dogs for the first time to become the most popular pets among urban China residents. In that year, around 59.5 percent of Chinese pet owners who lived in urban households owned cats, soaring from 46 percent in the previous year.
Cats have become the most favored pets in urban China, outnumbering dogs in 2021, according to a study on the nation's pet industry. The market value of the pet economy in China is expected to reach nearly 500 billion yuan (US$74 billion) in 2022 as more single young people and the elderly decide to be pet owners.