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Welcome to the new Extinct Era. Every Tuesday you'll get a few of our best stories about extinct and prehistoric animals, told properly, plus one Deep Cut for Premium members. Every Friday you'll get a shorter weekend edition.

THE BIG STORY

In 1971, a Hungarian snail researcher named József Vágvölgyi was on Pinta, a small island in the Galápagos, when he spotted something nobody expected to find there: a giant tortoise.

Pinta's tortoises were supposed to be gone. In the 1800s, whalers stripped the Galápagos of giant tortoises, storing them alive in their ships' holds as fresh meat, because a tortoise could survive many months without food or water. Across the islands they took as many as 200,000 tortoises in less than 50 years. Then in 1959, fishermen released three goats on Pinta, and the goats ate the island bare.

The tortoise Vágvölgyi saw was the only one left. In 1972, park rangers brought him to the tortoise breeding center at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz. He got the name that followed him for the rest of his life: Lonesome George.

The search for a mate never stopped. A $10,000 reward was reportedly offered for another Pinta tortoise, and nobody ever claimed it. In 1992, two females from Wolf Volcano, a related species, moved in with him. They finally nested in 2008 and 2009. Every egg was infertile.

A ranger named Fausto Llerena looked after him from 1983 on. On the morning of June 24, 2012, Llerena found George dead in his pen. He was thought to be around 100 years old, which isn't especially old for a giant tortoise. With him, the Pinta Island tortoise went extinct.

The story didn't quite end there. In 2012, Yale researchers reported 17 hybrid tortoises on Wolf Volcano with Pinta ancestry, and a few looked like the offspring of a purebred Pinta parent. The plan now is to breed the closest relatives and one day return their young to Pinta, an island with no Pinta tortoises since George left it in 1972.

QUICK STORY

About 360 million years ago, near the end of the Devonian, Dunkleosteus hunted the seas over what is now Ohio. It had no teeth. Its jaws carried sharp bony blades that sharpened themselves as they rubbed together. A study by Philip Anderson and Mark Westneat estimated its bite at over 1,000 pounds (about 4,400 newtons) of force and found its jaws could snap open in about a fiftieth of a second.

For decades, books said it was 5 to 10 meters (16 to 33 feet) long. The problem is that almost nothing but its armored head and shoulders ever fossilizes. The rest of the body was mostly cartilage, so the length was always a guess.

In 2023, paleontologist Russell Engelman worked it out properly: about 3.4 meters (11 feet) for a typical adult, and around 4.1 meters (13.5 feet) for the biggest one known, with a short, deep, chunky body. Still a monster, just a stockier one. And in 2025, a follow-up study found that nearly half of its skull was cartilage too.

QUICK STORY

In 1980, scientists at the Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan, China, took in a badly injured baiji, a Yangtze river dolphin. They nursed him back to health and named him Qi Qi. He lived in their dolphinarium for the next 22 years.

A few other baiji were kept in captivity in China between the 1970s and 1990s, and most of them didn't last long. Qi Qi was never paired with an adult female, so he could never breed. Outside, his species was disappearing. Baiji drowned after getting tangled in hook lines and nets, collided with boats, and were harmed by pollution and damage to their river.

Qi Qi died in 2002, the last baiji in captivity. In late 2006, two research boats covered the baiji's whole range in the Yangtze twice over six weeks, watching and listening. They found no sign of a single one. Scientists concluded the baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) is probably extinct, most likely because too many were caught in fishing gear.

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Did You Know? Camels started out in North America, about 45 million years ago, and lived there for tens of millions of years. Some crossed the Bering land bridge into Asia and others moved south into South America. But by about 13,000 years ago, every camel in North America had died out, on the very continent where camels began.

The rest of this Deep Cut is for Premium members.