466 THE DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS 



Australia has declared an embargo on the shipment of the rare duckbill. 

 Even the alligator in Florida is on the decline, and laws protecting them 

 have been passed. 



Extinction is the end result of continued reduction in range. All of 

 the dinosaurs became extinct in the Mesozoic Era at least 55 million 

 years ago. The woolly mammoth became extinct only a few thousand 

 years ago and with him went the great saber-toothed tiger which preyed 

 upon the mammoth. Man has deliberately or accidentally exterminated 

 many species during the last hundred years or so. The passenger pigeon 



Photo by Winchester 



Fig. 29.2. Restoration of the extinct dodo bird. This was a flightless bird which 



lived in great numbers on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. There was a 



great slaughter of these birds by man and his domestic animals when the island was 



discovered, and they have long since become extinct. 



was the most abundant game bird in North America one hundred and 

 fifty years ago. According to J. J. Audubon in 1813 he observed a 

 continuous flight of these birds for three days. The people in this area 

 fed on pigeons for a week at this time. The passenger pigeons nested 

 in dense rookeries, one of which was described by Alexander Wilson in 

 1810 near Shelbyville, Kentucky. It "was several miles in breadth and 

 upward of 40 miles in extent. In this tract almost every tree was fur- 

 nished with nests wherever the branches could accommodate them." 

 Many writers learnedly prophesied that the birds were so common that 

 no amount of hunting could affect their abundance. Yet by 1898 the 

 last nesting place had been broken up by market hunters and the great 

 groups reduced to a few scattered flocks which made no attempts to 

 nest. The last known passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 

 1914. 



