As the birds became scarcer, demand for their feathers, meat and pelts increased, and the last two breeding birds were unceremoniously strangled to death on their nest by a pair of Icelandic hunters in 1844, while a third man stamped on the single egg that the female had been incubating. The European population was almost entirely eradicated by the late 1600s, leading to one of the earliest environmental protection laws in history, passed by the British Parliament in 1770s, that prohibited killing the auks in Great Britain. And like the dodo, the fact that the birds were flightless made hunting and capturing them easy.
The birds were highly prized for their light and fluffy down, which was used as a stuffing for pillows and mattresses. The penguin-like great auk was a large, flightless seabird once native to the entire North Atlantic Ocean, from Greenland and eastern Canada to the British Isles and the westernmost coasts of Europe. Numbers continued to fall throughout the Middle Ages, when great swaths of forest in northern Africa were felled for timber, until finally the last surviving wild Atlas bear was shot and killed in the mid-1800s.
The bear's lengthy demise can be traced back to the time of the Roman Empire, when the animals were not only hunted for sport but captured, brought back to Rome, and made to battle gladiators and execute criminals in a gruesome spectacle known as damnatio ad bestias. The Atlas bear was the only species of bear native to Africa, and once inhabited the area around the Atlas Mountains in the far northwest of the continent. But it's by no means alone-the stories behind the disappearance of 10 other creatures are listed here. Although the dodo was never a particularly numerous species (the fact that it was flightless made it susceptible to floods and forest fires, which apparently kept its population naturally low), within less than a century of its discovery, interference by humans had led to its extinction. Native only to the tiny island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the birds had never learned any reason to be fearful of humans, so when European explorers first began to visit the island in the 17th century, the dodos were apparently so unsuspecting they could be picked up by hand straight from the wild and killed. The tale of the dodo is one of the most famous stories of extinction in all natural history.
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