Welcome to Wombat Hollow Org's
PREHISTORIC & EXTINCT RESEARCH DIVISION


Please click on an image above to be view website.
(link opens in a new window)

Extinct animals include those species which have been lost relatively recent as well as those which are more usually described as being prehistoric. Prehistoric means belonging to a period prior to recorded history, that is before about 2500 years ago. However, most of the prehistoric animals described here lived long before this time - millions, rather than thousands of years ago.

Life on earth probably began in the seas, somewhere around 4500 million years ago, but it was many more million years before the first creatures crawled out of the water and started to live on dry land. These were simple, invertebrate animals; the earliest vertebrates did not evolve until about 500 million years ago. The best known prehistoric animals are undoubtably the dinosaurs and their kin, great and small reptiles that dominated the air, land and water in their time. It is important to realise that even though they are long extinct, there rule on earth lasted well over a million years; man has existed for only a tiny fraction of this time. They died out in a cataclysmic, worldwide mass-extinction some 65 million years ago, probably because of dramatic geological climate change in the environment, to which they were unable to adapt.

Animals classified as extinct, as opposed to prehistoric, are those that have existed within man's lifetime and for whose demise he must often bear the responsibility. These include such familiar species as the "dodo" and the "Tasmanian tiger". Their end has come about because man has either hunted them to extinction or robbed them of the only habitat in which they were able to survive. If care is not taken, many more species will be added to this list, for the same reasons.

- Paul Perusic
Director / Founder
Wombat Hollow Org.