text:
Art Brut: The Scare-Fox (1910)
Text by Kevin Dann
Jan 10, 2023

Uncannily resembling an early work of outsider art, Head Gamekeeper D. Green’s “scare-fox” was an altogether utilitarian contraption, devised to send foxes fleeing from his Herefordshire game preserve’s pheasant field. Shutters driven by a clockwork mechanism sent light flashing from three sides of the crude box, while its fourth side bore a badly painted caricature of a human face. Before the “scare-fox”, Green would burn fires at night to keep the foxes from the pheasants, “and even after that used to lose some”. He was certain that two scare-foxes set up in any field or wood would keep the predators away, and had plans to make one with glass sides and bells timed to ring with the shutters.
Lawyer, editor, and indefatigable leader of the “More Game” movement in America, Dwight W. Huntington published this photograph of the scare-fox in Our Wild Fowl and Waders (1910) as part of his campaign to raise American awareness of the devastating depredations caused by “vermin”: a word that Americans used largely to refer to bed lice, but which in British gamekeeping circles had long been applied to any animal — from foxes, weasels, snakes, and stoats to rats, moles, and even shrews — that competed with hunters. Enthusiastically introducing the term in his March 1908 Independent “Game Bird Enemies”, Huntington would routinely employ it for the next three decades while cheerleading for “MORE GAME AND FEWER GAME LAWS”. Two journals he edited — Amateur Sportsman (1909–1912) and The Game Breeder (1912 –1938) — are a unique chronicle of the antagonistic reactions of hunters and “shooters” (waterfowl and other bird gunners) to the early twentieth century growth of the wildlife conservation movement. While Audubon Societies and kindred organizations lobbied legislatures to protect mammals and birds from destruction by both hunters and habitat loss, the Game Conservation Society (founded by Huntington in 1912) marshaled a nationwide campaign to stymie the “naturalists”: his generic and largely derogatory label for all of those who impinged on his dream of making America the world’s leading producer of game animals.
Having long held pride of place as the chief nemesis of game keepers and bird hunters, “Reynard” — the red fox, Vulpes vulpes, a circumpolar predator universally known as the most catlike of the canids — exercised Huntington’s ire more than any other vermin. Conceding that “I enjoy seeing an occasional sly fox about”, Huntington happily reported his own and others’ fox shooting exploits, including the Middle Island Club of Long Island’s outing to celebrate a worthy member’s eighty-second birthday, during which they killed a number of foxes:
From the time the first hound gave tongue Mr. Reynard was on his way. Oh, such music on a sharp, still and pretty morning can only be appreciated by those who know! Well, after chasing this cunning cuss for more than an hour, he was finally headed off by our young member, Mr. Howard Voorhies, who registered his first kill, and arrangements were made to have the pelt tanned and incidentally to decorate the cozy home in Brooklyn.
Like that macabre scare-fox, such accounts sit uneasily for us fox-admiring moderns, who are more likely to find sympathy with Oscar Wilde’s delicious declaration that fox-hunting was “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”.


text:
Dool-Hoff: A Dutch Maze with New Jerusalem at its Centre (1705)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 21, 2023

In his fifth-century commentary on Ezekiel’s vision of New Jerusalem, Jerome quotes the Aeneid, likening the path of salvation to a minotaur’s maze: “‘As once in lofty Crete the labyrinth is said to have had a route woven of blind walls’ . . . . So I, ente[r] the ocean of those scriptures and, so to speak, the labyrinth of God’s mysteries, of whom it is said ‘He made darkness his covert’ and ‘there are clouds in his circuit’”.
This 1705 maze (Dool-hoff), signed by the Dutch Catholic printer Claes Braau, also comes with clouded pathways, but here the way to New Jerusalem is cobbled by didactic verse. The broadsheet’s four dead-ends are burnished with spiritual gravity by its epigraphs: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14.12) and “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise” (Ephesian 5:15). Each pathway is paved with texts that narrate vocational and moral choices at various lengths. The road dedicated to economic wealth is full of twists and turns, but ultimately leads to the same fate as the short meander through a trench describing vanity: your journey’s abrupt termination. Choosing the “wrong path” forces the puzzler to backtrack, should they want to meet the Lamb of God at the maze’s center. Luckily, there are many ways to reach salvation, such as by studying the seven liberal arts.
The Dool-hoff was published in Haarlem during a period when neighboring Amsterdam was awash with secular mazes. “Doolhof inns”, a type of surreal public house, became increasingly popular in the seventeenth-century, treating tipsy patrons to mechanical statues, uncanny waxworks, and disorienting hedge mazes. Claes Braau’s Dool-hoff strayed from the path of these “astonishing and unprecedented novelties”, in Angela Vanhaelen’s words, and their “Bacchic conviviality”. Instead, it drew upon an older Christian tradition, represented by cathedral labyrinths like the one at Chartres, which W. H. Matthews hypothesized might reference “the various degrees of beatitude by which the soul approaches heaven, as figured by Dante”. That is, a byzantine journey through the labyrinth of the world toward a paradise of the heart. In its marriage of text and spatial warren, the Dool-hoff formally recalls the script labyrinth of Johann Neudörffer (1539), the Geistlich Labyrinth of Eberhard Kieser (1611), and several other precursors. Curiously, as the millennium progressed, the actual serpentine streets of Old Jerusalem would come to represent something much less beatific for Western Europeans: what George Prochnik calls an “entropic deliquescence of the Oriental” — the city’s perceived downward spiral under Ottoman rule.
Scholars are not sure who designed this Dool-hoff. While the text is credited to H. A. Hoejewilt, the name seems to be a bibliographic dead-end (Hoe je wilt means “However you want” in Dutch). Only a few copies survive. While the version above comes courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Jeff Saward offers a detailed description of an earlier specimen, discovered in the recycled backmatter papering a book of Quaker minutes, which can be read and viewed here. And for more religious spiralling, check out our post on Claude Mellan’s 1649 engraving The Sudarium of Saint Veronica.

source: public-domain-review

author: Hunter Dukes

type: collection

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Battles of the Sexes: Duels between Women and Men in 1400s Fechtbücher
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 18, 2023

Around the year 1430, illustrated German-language manuscripts began to depict the art of Zweikampf: dueling, or, literally, a battle of two. Known as “fight books” (Fechtbücher), these manuals developed out of a tradition founded by the semi-mythic Johannes Liechtenauer, a fencing instructor whose biography remains almost completely obscured. Enriched by novel technical vocabulary and rubbing shoulders with Arthurian romance, these fifteenth-century manuals are most notable for their vast quantities of visualized combat, influencing parallel traditions in Italy, Spain, and France. Yet spend enough time browsing Fechtbücher and you may notice something strange. Between colorful scenes of intimate grappling, demonstrations of the longsword, lance, falchion, knife, and scythe, cheap tricks for outwitting your enemy, and the mournful aftermath of battle, we find men and women engaged in judicial duels.
A form of legal trial, the duels often begin with the man in a pit or a tub, equipped with a wooden mace, while the woman circles above, slinging a stone wrapped in a veil or “loaded” into the sleeve of her chemise. The difference in height is meant to level any physical advantage of biological sex. Various painful scenarios play out. In one sequence from fencing master Hans Talhoffer’s 1467 Fechtbüch, the man somehow flips his opponent over, piledriving her into the ditch while flourishing his weapon as if emoting victory or assault. In another, the pinned woman executes a reversal on the pit man, putting her opponent into a headlock before proceeding to pull him backward out of the earth by his ears or groin. Submission, not death, seems to be the goal. Legal codes differed on what came next: the Stadtbuch von Augsburg (ca. 1272) called for the defeated to be buried alive, while the Freisinger Rechtsbuch (ca. 1328) suggested cutting off the woman’s hand and beheading the man. ※※Indexed under…HolesMen in
If these images are baffling, so too are the hastily researched articles they have fostered. In a kind of digital telephone game, a three-paragraph-long note on Talhoffer — posted by University of Oklahoma Professor Kenneth L. Hodges on the Academy of European Medieval Martial Arts webpage — is linked out to with embellished claims. There are no fewer than a dozen articles online that describe Talhoffer as outlining a common late medieval practice of divorce-by-combat — the term does not appear in the manual or post — and credit Hodges with the 1467 Fechtbüch’s discovery, despite the professor’s use of an 1887 facsimile. As Allison Coudert writes, “nowhere except in the Holy Roman Empire were judicial duels ever considered fitting means to settle marital disputes, and no record of such a duel has been found after 1200”. A more sober reflection of historical consensus regarding these images comes from a BBC interview with Neil Grant, a trustee of the UK’s Royal Armouries: “It's very, very odd – please do not ask me to explain it!” Instead of offering a theory, others have resorted to practice. In 2016, participants in the European martial arts “Dreynevent” staged a simulated combat based on Thalhoffer’s manuscript.
But some attempt at explanation is warranted given the quantity of misinformation. Was trial by combat an actual practice for resolving legal disputes between Germanic women and men in the 1400s? Or do the images reference a kind of premodern Punch and Judy show, introduced to liven swordplay pedagogy with exaggerated depictions of a perennial struggle between the sexes? To answer those questions requires knowing more about law in the era. As R. Howard Bloch describes, discussing the spread of trials by combat westward into France, this form of justice made legal process “indistinguishable from divine process, human will from godly will, positive law from divine law”.
Finding its roots in Frankish society, trial by ordeal (whether fire, water, or combat) reached an apex between 800–1200, after the Carolingians sanctioned the now-Christenized practice. Distinct from matters of honor — the more familiar duels that involve throwing down the gauntlet at a perceived slight — these trials by combat were often prescribed only for the most serious crimes. Yet the law frequently codified the use of substitutions. Amputees, the elderly, chronically ill, and women were encouraged or mandated to seek a champion to fight on their behalf. This is not to say medieval women did not draw weapons: one of the earliest European fencing treatises features swordswomen fighting alongside male counterparts, and Vickie L. Ziegler notes that “while fighting was generally considered a man’s work, the redoubtable women of Bavaria were allowed to do battle”. Yet, for the majority, because these trials were not feats of strength — a belief that casts a perplexing light on the very logic of substitution — a proxy would do just fine. In Kathryn Gravdal’s words, “God makes the truth seen and tangible”.
How, then, would a woman find herself wielding a makeshift flail, circling a man buried up to his waist in the 1400s? In short, she probably wouldn’t. By the time these scenes began appearing in Fechtbücher, trials by ordeal of all kinds were on a steep decline. Scholars offer various explanations for the images gathered below. Claiming that “the cultural mores of the time absolutely forbade such things”, Hugh T. Knight, Jr. draws our focus to how popular entertainments “enjoyed role-switching themes for metaphoric or humorous purposes”. Yet Hodges might disagree. Analyzing the language used by Talhoffer to describe this combat, he notes how the author “is taking this seriously, not exoticizing it”. Coudert offers what seems to be the most likely explanation: fencing masters like Talhoffer and Paulus Kal copied outmoded dueling practices from passed down stories or now-lost manuscripts “to make their treatises as historically comprehensive as possible”. This is not to say that these events were not theoretically possible: a cruel 1276 Augsburg law required women who accused men of sexual violence to fight without a champion, if there were no witnesses present to the crime. We just do not have much evidence that these duels between men and women actually took place with any regularity.
And there is a chance that these images are more engaged with the history of literature than law. In Heinrich von Neustadt’s epic Apollonius von Tyrland (ca. 1300), Flordelîse calls for a duel against Silvia of Nazareth to avenge her married sister, who he attempted to violate and subsequently slandered. Because “Si ist ain weib, er ist ain man” (She is a woman, he is a man), the city bishop finds himself stumped. Fortunately, his bookishness gets rewarded when he remembers reading about an old duel that was made fair by putting the man in a pit. Some believe this story itself was inspired by a widely circulated case of a woman who defeated a man during a 1288 combat in Bern, which Ariella Elema has called “the sole example in European history of a trial by battle between a man and a woman that the litigants pursued all the way to combat and fought in person.” More than a century before judicial duels between women and men began appearing in Fechtbücher, these events were abnormal occurrences or the stuff of a distant past, accurate or invented, witnessed firsthand by few and remembered mostly in texts.
Below you can browse a gallery of images depicting judicial duels between women and men. And here you can purchase a new translation of Talhoffer’s 1467 Fechtbüch.


text:
Frost Flowers on the Windows (1899)
Text by Kevin Dann
Jan 19, 2023

In Frost Flowers on the Windows, expatriate Swedish actor, theater producer, and writer Albert Alberg (1838–1924) leads us on a fin-de-siècle walkabout across Chicago. His goal is to document a “New, Truly Great Discovery”: the extraordinary power of windowpane frost to take “ice photographs”, images capable of expressing the “vital qualities” of life forms close to the glass.
During the Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899, which plunged North America into record lows, Alberg was eating at his favorite German restaurant. Looking up, he saw the outlines of ferns, celery stalks, and a withered geranium etched in ice upon the window. Although most of the celery on his table had been consumed, leaving only undesirable leftovers — stalks that were “thin and small and without scarcely any leaves, mere tufts being suffered to remain” — their images appeared in frost as the “most vividly depicted stalks of celery with sprigs and leaves”, proof that “no other plant [is] endowed with such an extraordinary powerful vitality”.
After his supper, Alberg proceeds to conduct an “espionage into this secret branch of nature”. He finds tropical plants reproduced on the frosted glass of a saloon serving punch made from coconut and sugarcane; pineapples in the windows of a Greek fruit dealer; cereals, vegetables, and even a shopgirl’s lace apron on the panes of a Swedish restaurant; and, at a small grocery, celery stalks are again cast across the glass. Writing during a decade in which celery tonics dominated the patent medicine trade, Alberg takes this last apparition as proof that “‘Jack Frost’ therefore seemingly most emphatically endorses celery as a conserver and restorer of vitality”.
Though a modern reader might take this mercantile frost extravaganza to be Alberg’s deep-freeze-induced hallucination, he mentions a number of witnesses. Spying cabbage leaves delineated on the kitchen window at a friend’s home, he ventures (correctly) that they had recently dined on cabbage. Calling at the home of another friend, he finds a miniature landscape — complete with flat-roofed house, steepled church, and a moored boat — portrayed on the window of his son’s bedroom. When the son confesses that he often dreams of the family’s ancestral farm outside Cleveland, his father recognizes the ice tracing as a fair depiction.
Having moved in Spiritualist circles during his fifteen-year residence in London, and Chicago’s large Theosophical community since his arrival in 1890, Alberg writes prose tinged with both the Spiritualist language of “materialization” and Theosophical language of the astral realm. Apart from his countryman Linnaeus’ 1761 report of producing ice figures from crushed seeds, the only authority Alberg cites is Theosophical writer Franz Hartmann on the subject of alchemical palingenesis — the resurrection of life forms. And despite a long Western tradition of anthropomorphizing the uncanny animations of ice crystals as the magical work of “Jack Frost”, and a full-blown Victorian rage for “frost flowers” (known as Eisblumen in Germany, where the Romantic imagination was gripped by the creative powers of these shapes), no one had previously conducted the sort of phenomenological survey that Alberg undertook during that bone-shatteringly cold winter of 1899.
That nary a single illustration accompanies Alberg’s text is frustrating, but perhaps understandable, for only a handful of pioneer photographers had mastered the technical demands required to capture images of such subtle forms. Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley’s unprecedented microphotographs of snowflakes were first made in the 1880s; Englishman James Leadbeater published his first clear photographs of windowpane frost in the 1890s. Nearly all of the dozens of Victorian poetic paeans to “frost-work” emphasized its ephemerality. At first light or breath, the tracework would fade.
Sadly, the fate of this monograph went the way of frost flowers. Aside from a plea to readers from The American Monthly Microscopical Journal to test his findings, and a single notice of the book in the Chicago journal of popular occultism The Star of the Magi, the work vanished from view. Yet the author’s own interest in the phenomenon continued unabated. In 1912, when Alberg sent a copy of Frost Flowers to British zoologist Alfred Russell Wallace, he still hoped to publish further observations. Living once again in Sweden, Alberg lamented how the use of double-pane windows largely prevented “fine ice-palingenesis”.
When he died in 1924, Alberg was unaware that Ehrenfried Pfeiffer — struck by the difference between frost forms on the windows of florist and butcher shops in Basel, where he was studying chemistry — had been working to develop “sensitive crystallization” methods for demonstrating etheric forces, the elusive “vital energy” hinted at by Alberg’s discovery.

author: Kevin Dann


text:
Floating Phantoms: A. G. Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910)
Text by Kevin Dann
Nov 15, 2022

There is something inevitable about Alfred Goldsborough Mayer’s attraction to jellyfish. Like Ernst Haeckel before him, Mayer could never “remain insensible to the rare grace of form and delicate beauty of color of these creatures of the sea”. While Haeckel’s highly-stylized illustrations of Medusae are widely celebrated, the seventy-six color plates of Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910) — in three quarto-size volumes comprising 735 pages of text and 428 line figures — are almost entirely unknown to all but specialists. Each figure is executed with an eye toward satisfying the exacting taxonomic task of classifying jellyfish’s bewildering diversity. Poorly known in Mayer’s day, Medusae of the World described 565 species of Hydromedusae — mostly small jellyfish commonly called the “veiled medusae” for the presence of propulsion-assisting veils on their bells — and 180 species of Scyphomedusae, or “true jellyfishes”, including familiar species such as the Moon Jelly (Aurelia aurita), the Sea Nettle (Chrysaora quinquecirrha), the Lion’s Mane Jelly (Cyanea capillata), the Cannonball Jelly (Stomolophus meleagris), and various Upside-down Jellies (Cassiopea spp.).
These handsome volumes are more than a compendium of this difficult phylum, for Mayer’s gracefully written text also summarized the latest research on Medusae life history, embryology, cytology, ecology, physiology, regeneration, and behavior. Having in his first scientific publications included superb line drawings of box tortoises, garter snakes, and the variegated wing scales of butterflies, his gift for zoological illustration and close natural history observation drew him to the attention of Alexander Agassiz, son of the titan Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, and founder of a private marine biological laboratory at Newport, Rhode Island. Contemplating the location information for many of Mayer’s gorgeous drawings, one gets a glimpse of the littoral nature of Gilded Age scientific patronage; from Casco Bay, Maine to Newport, RI, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, to Chesapeake Bay, and down through Cape Fear to Key West and Nassau Harbor, the richest places to collect these colorful flowers of the sea were also the favorite haunts of America’s yachting set. The aging and somewhat tyrannical Agassiz sent Mayer on collecting expeditions much farther afield — Fiji, Java, Tahiti, Japan, most of the major islands and coasts of Oceania and Australia — and by the time that Mayer’s opus magnum was published, “Alex the Great” (Mayer’s wife Harriet preferred “Ivan the Terrible”) had passed away.
Though Medusae of the World is long on tedious taxonomy and short on descriptive natural history narrative, there is still a dramatic nemesis at the heart of these three volumes: Ernst Haeckel, whose limited field experience and zeal for new species made him a “splitter”, as contrasted with Mayer’s “lumper” taxonomic tendency. “I have seen Haeckel’s ‘species’ only in medusa which I have myself preserved”, Mayer confessed. “They appear not to exist except in alcohol.” While Haeckel’s paintings turn the floating phantoms into baroque spectacles of color and flowing form, Mayer’s medusae are more sober, their tentacles subdued, their umbellate bells transparent. Even his text descriptions tend to mute the hues, in favor of faithful phenomenology; speaking of the Mediterranean medusa Carybdea marsupialis, Mayer says: “Bell and pedalia dull milky-ocher, due to the color of the exumbrella nematocyst-warts. Flexible parts of tentacles dull pink. Ocelli very dark brown, nearly black; basal branches of gastric cilli dull horny-brown.”
For all of his unromantic exactitude, Mayer’s jellyfish are nonetheless dreamily beckoning forms, tissues which find pulsing animation at the aqueous threshold of life. Below you can browse a selection of illustrations from Mayer’s three volumes. Captions can be found, after clicking the source link, on the page before each plate.


text:
The Tanzmasken of Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt (ca. 1924)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Nov 22, 2022

In January 1924, a German studio photographer of some status, Minya Diéz-Dührkoop, took portraits of a young avant-garde artist couple, Lavinia Schulz (1896–1924) and her husband Walter Holdt (1899–1924). The photos are unusual, partly because the couple’s faces are never visible, and partly because the costumes they’re wearing are so bizarre: Grandiose, but also earthy and oddball — a brigade of science fiction bogeymen, homespun.
Schulz and Holdt made these costumes for dancing; they performed under the name Die Maskentänzer (The Mask Dancers). The outfits are more sculpture than clothing, and they entirely swallow up the wearer. Some suggest a mongrel collision of characters — a buggy-eyed insect meets a jester meets a bearded tomato — and others allude to zippy motion, with eyeballs cartoonishly pulling off the face. Wires poke out and wooden blocks dangle, a bridge seesaws from shoulder to shoulder. Many of the geometric silhouettes defy anatomy; hands, feet, and heads are all boxed in, with no apparent exit. The bright, discordant colors were apparently chosen based on esoteric rules. Remarkably, Schulz and Holdt’s craftsmanship, especially the sewing, keeps pace with their imaginative reach.
Six months after the portrait sitting, Schulz shot Holdt in the head, and then turned the gun on herself. Both died. Their one-year-old infant son, who was there beside them, was unharmed. Following the murder-suicide, the couple’s apartment was cleaned out, and their things taken to the Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts, where they were stashed in the attic. The boxes were forgotten for six decades, and luckily so; had the collection been properly catalogued, it would have likely been seized by the Nazis.
At the time of their death, Schulz and Holdt were somewhat notorious in the local art community. They’d performed recently at the Hamburg Museum, and also at a large arts festival. One historian describes their short-lived practice as “among the strangest produced by the whole Weimar dance culture”. Schulz was indisputably the duo’s leader. She directed the costume-making, and choreographed the dances. She was also the enforcer of the artists’ distinct philosophy, which correlated aesthetic value with suffering. The raison d'être of live performance, Schulz believed, was intensity, and the performer could channel intensity only if she was herself in an intense frame of mind. Privation made this state more accessible. “Art has to be exhausting”, Schulz wrote, “otherwise it is worthless”. Austerity, deprivation, and extreme self-discipline were essential — not so as to survive the travails of a creative life, but as a pre-condition for creating anything of value.
Schulz practiced what she preached. The couple’s basement apartment had a dirt floor, outdoor toilet, and no electricity or running water. They slept in hammocks, or on straw. Gray tights and unitards were worn as everyday apparel, so that they could rehearse at any moment. Their materials were scavenged, and they avoided machines. Believing that art and commerce shouldn’t mix, they refused money for their work, which led to bouts of starvation, even after their child was born. To the interior of the costumes they added elements that were invisible to the audience but heightened their personal discomfort: weights, for instance, and nails pointing inward. Some of the outfits weigh more than forty kilograms. Schulz and Holdt also hurt each other. Their storied fights involved kicking and punching, terrible obscenities, and wrestling on the ground. During one rehearsal, with a large group watching, Holdt dragged Schulz around the room by her hair. Schulz apparently relished this; as a friend recalled, “catastrophe” was her métier.
Schulz seems to have imbibed some of her notions about art directly from her mentor, the German Expressionist theater producer and theorist Lothar Schreyer. A former copyright lawyer and future Nazi, Schreyer cultivated a tiny, cliquish circle of artsy young people, which he helmed as creative priest and chief. He had an outsized effect on Schulz’s life. He recruited her when she was just sixteen and had left her family in Lusatia to study in Berlin. Schulz stayed at Schreyer’s side for the next eight years. His description of her in his memoirs has the whiff of erotic intimacy: “wild and passionate, restrained only by the strict discipline of art”.
Schreyer flattered himself an art prophet, and Schulz proved an ideal disciple. She amplified his directives, and literalized his abstractions. For instance, when Schreyer cast Schulz in the lead role of his 1918 production of August Stramm’s Sancta Susanna, and explained the production concept as “a play of naked man”, Schulz decided to play her part naked, or nearly so. Her mentor was pleased, and much of the audience horrified. One critic called it “a murderous attack on the theatre”. Schreyer’s funding vanished after this production, so he moved the increasingly cultish company away from Berlin to the quiet town of Hamburg. (Subsequent performances were invitation-only, no critics allowed.) In Hamburg, Schreyer recruited some new acolytes from the local high school, among them Holdt. Holdt and Schulz fell into a relationship that was preternaturally intense. After one epic scene of violence, Schreyer kicked them both out. Without Schulz’s talent, however, the group folded. Schreyer moved on, taking a position at the Bauhaus teaching stagecraft, while his former students struck out on their own.
Schulz was then twenty-four-years old and Holdt twenty. Their marriage and collaboration would last three years. Abstract, handmade costumes remained central to their practice, and Schulz used her teacher’s system of notation to choreograph dances that were low to the ground, with lots of lunging, squatting, and creeping. (Schreyer had said that one should not dance like a marionette, as in ballet, but like someone holding a marionette.) They scored their work with Schönberg’s cacophonous twelve-tone system, formulated just a few months previous. ※※Indexed under…Dancenotation
Schulz’s choreographic notes reveal the way that she linked pain with ecstatic transformation. Describing one character’s motion, she writes, “Steaming, snorting, gathers, curves, throws itself, throws, pushes, tears and sinks, breathing heavily to the ground. Dead?! She rises again, suffering-lashed, pain-tormented, snort-blasted.” The specter of death, it seems, was Schulz’s personal font of life.
Some say that Holdt was cheating on Schulz and she shot him in revenge. Others that Holdt had retreated to bed, from illness or depression, and Schulz was furious that he’d abdicated their collaborative practice. It was widely reported that the two were emaciated; indeed, many Germans were starving in 1924. What’s certain is that their costumes, rediscovered in 1988, remain singularly remarkable. It’s always a gamble when an artist bets on suffering, and who’s to say that Schulz and Holdt lost?
Special thanks to Joachim Baur.

author: Sasha Archibald


text:
The Book of Bread (1903)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 5, 2023

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, writes Owen Simmons at the outset of The Book of Bread (1903), a work he hopes will definitively establish “the link between the bakery and the laboratory” and speak to “the needs of the baker and of the miller”. And the text, at times, does indeed read like a lab manual for commercial bakeries: Simmons was a breadmaker’s breadmaker, co-founder of the National School of Bakery in London and frequent contributor to The British Baker. The book contains equations for the conversion of starch into alcohol (by way of maltose, dextrin, and glucose), chemical explanations for why viscoelasticity is “injurious to the proper manufacture of several kinds of biscuits”, and intricate discussions of nitrogenic proteids, which, once transformed into peptones, “nourish the yeast by percolating its cellulose”.
In addition to its scientific learning, the preface notes two unique aspects that set The Book of Bread apart from competitors: a tabulated appendix, featuring the results of more than 360 baking experiments, and its “most expensive illustrations”, which will force readers “to admit that never before have they seen such a complete collection of prize loaves illustrated in such an excellent manner”. An early entry in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s history of the photobook, the attention lent to loaves left the writers in awe: “Here, at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the humblest, yet most essential of objects is catalogued as precisely, rigorously and objectively as any work by a 1980s Conceptual artist.” Kenneth Josephson’s later photographic experiment, The Bread Book (1973), seems to directly reference Simmons’ work.
In many ways, The Book of Bread anticipates the rise of molecular gastronomy in the 1990s and 2000s. Simmons’ demonstrations of scientific learning are purely in service of the glutenous arts, and his passion for bread leavens, here and there, moments of flat discussion. The author elaborates on the “vigour of yeast”, the textural superiority of a “soft, pliable, and springy crumb”, the causes of “crumbliness”, “ropiness”, and “blisters and bladders”. Yet Simmons’ tireless displays of authoritative gravity — his chapter epigraphs include lines from Pope and Tennyson — occasionally come across as humorously overbaked. Consider, for instance, his taxonomy of holes:
Concerning holes in bread there are many conflicting opinions. Men engaged daily in the handling of dough differ ; thinking men who commit their thoughts to paper are diametrically opposed ; but we think the differences of opinion would disappear if the different kinds of holes were kept in mind, and the subject more fully discussed. Holes in bread may be divided into two classes—those, on the one hand, which are more or less distributed in a loaf, being of medium size and numerous, and those, on the other hand, which are very large, being only one or at most two in the entire loaf. There are many subsidiary causes, which we shall proceed to discuss. . .
After roughly three hundred pages of dense, carbo-scholastic prose, Simmons offers no conclusion or parting remarks. His last sentence, before turning to tabulation, is a minor caution to bakers: “In using compressed yeast see that it is fresh, and not too soft.”
Simmons preceded the trade edition of his book with a stunning edition de luxe of roughly 350 copies, bound in red grained Moroccan leather with the original silver bromide prints pasted in. While the larger print run of the trade edition necessitated a switch to more cost-effective photomechanical illustrations, Simmons still made the unusual step of retaining two pasted-in silver bromide prints (the ones bordered by green below) in addition to the beautiful chromolithograph plates, where golden loaves glow against an ultramarine background. As @incunabula notes, this reference text is surrounded by mystery. The talented photographer remains nameless and, for unknown reasons, very few deluxe editions of The Book of Bread have survived, despite a fairly generous initial printing.


text:
Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Maps and Charts (1887/93)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Feb 15, 2023

Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Study (1887) unpacks like a matryoshka doll. The experience begins with a heavy wood box, outfitted with leather straps and brass clasps, inside of which is a sheaf of complex maps and charts, and a learning guide on how they should be used in the classroom. The maps are each the size of a small rug (ranging between two and four feet) — large enough to lay on the floor and have pupils gather around — and all save one are printed expensively, on thick paper with chromolithography. The exception is a green relief map of the United States, made of plaster and papier-mâché and built directly in the carrying case. It’s the least charming of the suite, though it made Yaggy justifiably proud: most of the mountains he depicts had yet to be measured. The remaining maps, of Earth and its cosmos, are packed in such a way as to avoid being crinkled by the Rocky Mountains.
Some of “Yaggy’s maps”, as they were usually called, are straightforward two-dimensional posters, but others feature elaborate cutaways and intricate layers. “Physical Geography”, for instance, presents as a bucolic orb of rivers and fields, with an erupting volcano in the corner. By adjusting riveted metal tabs, this scene falls away, and a new view is revealed underneath, showing all variety of subterranean human activity: Venetian grottoes; a cave in Kentucky; quartz, salt, and coal mines. Beneath this layer is another, with a diagram of the stratified ages of the earth in striped autumnal colors; and then, finally, the mass of land becomes a bustling aquarium, starring a one-eyed octopus and a fleet of pulsing jellyfish. The cutaways in Yaggy’s “Planetary System” map are even more complex. Seasons can be adjusted with a dial, and translucent linen inlays reveal the corresponding placement of constellations, which shine when backlit. There’s a cutaway showing the phases of a solar eclipse, and another with a view of the moon as seen by the world’s most powerful telescope. Every corner packs a surprise; the innermost layer, “Chart of the Heavens”, draws the nocturnal sky like a party, crowded with animals and gods.  ※※Indexed under…Revelationthrough the lifting of flaps
Mapmaker was not Levi Walter Yaggy’s (1842–1912) chief occupation; he was best known as a businessman, though he was also an inventor, author, conservation advocate, prohibitionist, and elder in the Presbyterian Church. Yaggy founded and helmed an enormously successful business in Chicago, Western Publishing. Western was a subscription book rather than trade book publisher; its volumes, sold door-to-door, had lower cultural status and made far more money. One of Western’s books, co-written by Yaggy when he was twenty-eight years old, became an astounding bestseller. The Royal Path of Life: Or, Aims and Aids to Success and Happiness (1876) was a nonfiction blockbuster for three decades, and sold upwards of 800,000 copies, a number roughly equivalent, during Yaggy’s time, to the populations of Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans combined.
Yaggy enjoyed his success. He bought and sold various properties, and built a grand house down the street from the Mayor of Chicago. Delighted by a topiary maze in Switzerland, he re-created it on the acreage surrounding his house. He was a trustee at nearby Lake Forest College, and sent his three sons to Yale. He wrote more books, and filed many clever patents: not only charts, maps, and educational tools, but an early vending machine; a rototiller; an award-winning device for holding animal feed. There is a ghost town in Kansas bearing Yaggy’s name, where he once planted a million catalpa trees as a proposed alternative to cutting old growth forest.
It took a certain amount of swagger for Yaggy to assume that a market existed for children’s educational materials as lush as those that he designed. The Geographical Study cost today’s equivalent of nearly two thousand dollars, and the presumed customers included one-room schoolhouses that adjourned when the harvest came in. Many American cities didn’t yet have a public library. No worries, Yaggy was first and foremost a salesman. His pitch went like this: Teachers trained in the most up-to-date pedagogy deserved the best tools to suit. His maps were new, modern, essential. Adverts featured the word “Revolution” in all caps, and rhetorically asked, “Why follow the old ruts?” At every opportunity, Yaggy associated his maps with “the spirits and methods of the New Education”, alluding to a way of teaching that prioritized direct examination. Like other nineteenth-century creators of inspired pedagogical materials, such as Emma Willard, Ellen Harding Baker, and Edward and Orra Hitchcock, Yaggy believed that wonder was the helpmate of learning.
Once in hand, the maps sold themselves. One teacher rhapsodized that the set was “absolutely marvelous”, “perfectly unique”, “wonderfully ingenious”, and “as necessary . . . as is a telescope in an observatory”. Portfolios were purchased by far-flung schools in Utah, North Carolina, Nevada, Missouri, Maryland, North Carolina, and many other places. One district in Pennsylvania bought eight sets of Yaggy’s maps, and only a single chalkboard. Few of Yaggy’s maps survive, likely because they were fingered by dozens of small hands, year after year.
It’s obvious now that the Geographical Study contains many errors: errors of fact, as revealed by the last century of scientific exploration, and errors of prejudice, too. (The accompanying Teacher’s Hand Book instructs students that Caucasians are “the most handsome, active, wise and powerful people in the world”.) The distortion for which Yaggy is most accountable is his inordinate fondness for pastiche. He compressed the world’s variety into digestible tableaus, brazenly mingling fauna and topography that never abut in real life. (In a later series of maps, Yaggy’s Geographical Portfolio from 1893, animals from three oceans swim in common waters, and a desert is bordered by a forest.) Is there a cost to making a map more charming than true?
In The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard speaks disparagingly of maps like Yaggy’s. Bachelard scoffs at the “schoolboy’s desert”, and the “Sahara to be found in every school atlas”. Such representations, he argues, dangerously truncate the desert’s immensity. The child is never made to feel his smallness, which is perhaps the most important geography lesson of all. Yaggy’s world too easily fits inside its case.
Below you can browse both the Geographical Study and the Geographical Portfolio, courtesy of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, or read a copy of the 1888 Teacher’s Hand Book: Designed to Accompany Yaggy’s Geographical Study, held by the Library of Congress, here.


text:
A Bestiary of Loss

Nov 30, 2022

According to many ecologists, we are in the midst of a new mass extinction event. And unlike any other in the Earth’s 4.54 billion year history, this one is caused by a single species of primate: humans. Of course, the death of species is a natural part of evolution, but fuzzy estimates put the current rate of loss at somewhere between 100 and 10,000 times higher than background rates. Our current extinction event is closer to the mass die offs caused by volcanic activity and asteroid impacts than any governing force of evolution. This is both old news and recent history. As early humans ventured from Africa to prosper across the globe, they seem to have left ecological devastation in their wake. Paleoindians, for example, are controversially hypothesized to have hunted various species of North American megafauna into extinction: saber tooth cats, giant beavers, and two tonne armadillos longer than a king-size bed.
But to chalk up the natural world’s destruction to something innately human obscures the specific institutions and individuals that were (and are) outsized contributors to extinction. The stories of the vanished animals gathered below allow us to glimpse these forces and actors. They are stories that are unique to each species, but which exhibit haunting affinities and causal similarities, and all arrive at the same conclusion. Humans might be unparalleled predators, but recent extinctions demonstrate how our deadliest weapon is the forms of collective behavior that economic, political, and social life enshrine. The history of modern extinctions is inseparable from the history of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. Of the roughly 800 animal species estimated to have gone extinct since 1500 — and that is only counting those documented — many met tellingly analogous ends: they have been hunted to death for sustenance or sport, killed off by intentionally introduced species and those stowed away on imperial ships, or forced to leave their native habitats as forests were cleared for fields to feed distant metropoles. Despite an enduring fantasy that humans are somehow distinct from the animal kingdom, the loss of biodiversity heralds a grave threat to our species as well — a species that relies upon an intimate interconnection with biological systems for continued life on this planet.
In the wake of lukewarm policy achievements at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which ended this month without a commitment to phase out fossil fuels — and at a historic moment when young people are looking toward their environmental future and fighting the hand-wringing apathy of older generations — we have assembled a partial mausoleum of animals lost. This post will continue to be updated, with newly extinct animals, although we hope they fail to materialize at currently projected rates. Our list is truncated, dramatically so — to feature every animal lost since the Age of Exploration would sacrifice specificity for a false sense of completeness. We’ve been drawn to those species that somehow speak to the beauty and variety of what is gone: through their behaviors, impact on biodiversity, and, of course, striking naturalist illustrations in the public domain. There is an unsettling irony here. It prompts the question if our pull toward these animals is not entirely dissimilar from earlier attempts to possess their feathers and hides as tokens of rarity. And many of the illustrations gathered below are based on specimens extracted through the same expeditions, networks, and regimes that ultimately contributed to the animal’s demise.
Images and stories cannot bring back the dead. But we hope this post might help provide a resource for collective mourning, a means to visualize the scale of loss, and perhaps a spur to action. There are 3797 animals currently on IUCN's critically endangered list. We recommend this earth.org introduction on mitigating biodiversity loss; the ranging overview of threats and solutions to animal extinction published by The Solutions Journal, and The Royal Society’s biodiversity hub.

AurochsBos primigenius1627
Once widespread in Asia, Europe, and North Africa, the aurochs is believed to be a wild ancestor of domestic cattle. One of the largest herbivores in the Holocene, their grazing of nuts, twigs, and grass shaped historical ecosystems, and their manure supported vast kingdoms of insects and fungi. A prominent participant in human history — and one of the richest food sources before the advent of agriculture — aurochs were among the earliest figures to appear in Paleo- and Neolithic cave paintings and petroglyphs, and feature across Egyptian reliefs, Bronze Age figurines, and classical literature. (The Latin “A” descends from a Phoenician character that some believe was originally meant to represent the creature’s horns, still visible when inverted: ∀). As forests were increasingly clearcut and pastures enclosed, their populations dwindled. The last surviving herd of aurochs lived in the marshy woodlands of Poland’s Jaktorów Forest. The final cow passed away in 1627.
DodoRaphus cucullatus1662
Famously flightless and fearless of humans, the dodo was endemic to Mauritius, evolutionarily forgoing flight due to the richness of abundant food sources and lack of immediate predators. Little remains known about their behavior or appearance (accounting for the varied depiction in naturalist illustrations) due to the narrow research window between their first recorded description, by Dutch sailors in 1598, and last accepted sighting in 1662. Mistaken for an ostrich, albatross, and vulture by colonial explorers, one of the most detailed descriptions of the bird comes from Sir Thomas Herbert’s 1634 travelogue, where he characterizes the creature as having eyes like diamonds and being of a “shape and rareness [that] may antagonize the Phoenix of Arabia”. Despite being sent to Europe and Asia, the last recorded captive dodo died not long after arriving in Nagasaki. Scientists state with confidence that the animal was probably extinct in the wild by 1700 from habitat loss, the introduction of predators to Mauritius, and overharvesting by humans. First used as an example of human-induced extinction in an 1883 magazine, the bird’s memory lives on in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where, with perhaps tragic irony, the dodo declares that the best thing to help the animals would be “a Caucus-race”.
Steller's sea cowHydrodamalis gigas1768
Once ranging across the North Pacific during the Pleistocene epoch, by the eighteenth century, this sirenian mammal was found only around the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. Its first recorded encounter with humans occurred in 1741, when the German botanist and explorer George Wilhelm Steller shipwrecked on Bering Island and spent a year researching wildlife while awaiting rescue, which explains how he came to describe the animal’s taste as reminiscent of corned beef. An obligate herbivore, we know little about the sea cow’s behavior beyond what was observed by Steller, though — unique for its biological order — the animal’s buoyancy was so great that it was unable to submerge in water, instead harvesting kelp with its toothless, bristled mouth from across the ocean surface. Our knowledge is also limited regarding the cause of the sirenian’s extinction, but it is conjectured that populations may have initially dwindled due to hunting by the Siberian Yupik people, and then were further depleted by fur traders traveling the route to Alaska pioneered by Vitus Bering. Literature readers may know the animal as the rare white seal from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and the poetry of W. G. Sebald. While later sightings were reported in the 1800s and as late as 1962, the official extinction date remains 1768, twenty-seven years after Steller discovered the sea cow.
BluebuckHippotragus leucophaeus1799
The bluebuck was a species of antelope found in South Africa until the early 1800s. With a lesser mane than roan and sable antelopes, its name derives from a distinct gray-blue coat. When European colonists encountered the animal during the seventeenth century, it was already in decline, due perhaps to a changing grassland habitat around the Cape Peninsula. Hunted to extinction by settlers within a century, biologists did not have long to observe the creature’s behavior before it vanished — many of the extant illustrations of bluebucks seem to have been based on taxidermized specimens. Originally thought to be a blue goat by Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, scientists now know that the animal once occupied a larger territory. It appears in shamanic paintings attributed to the San peoples and in Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), where the antelope’s belly is said to be “as white as the driven snow”.
Réunion giant tortoiseCylindraspis indica1840
Comparable in size to modern Galapagos giant tortoises, this animal was endemic to Réunion, where its vast creeps were important for maintaining the biodiversity of forests. Noted to be friendly, curious, and without fear, its populations were exploited by passing sailors in need of oil and food, further shrinking when settlers from France and Madagascar began to occupy the island in the seventeenth century. Like its fellow Mascarene giant tortoise species, the animal’s slow metabolism allowed it to survive without food or water for extended periods, making it perversely suited for being packed into ship holds. While attempts at preservation were legislated for tortoises on Mauritius in the seventeenth century, meaningful protection was not offered for more than a century. The introduction of invasive species further decimated hatchling numbers, with the final observed tortoises dying off in the 1840s. One of the only taxidermized Mascarene tortoise specimens is kept in the haunting Grande Galerie de l’Évolution’s Salle des Espèces Menacées et des Espèces Disparues (The Room of Endangered and Extinct Species) in Paris. As Matt Stanfield writes at the Remembrance Day for Lost Species project, “Disappearing when they did, at a time when modern science was still emerging, the Mascarene giant tortoises occupy a strange halfway house between poorly-understood human-induced casualties of the early modern era and better-known lost species of more recent times.”
Southern black rhinocerosDiceros bicornis bicornis1850
Historically plentiful in South Africa, southern Namibia, and possibly also Lesotho and Botswana, this species of black rhinoceros went extinct around 1850 due to hunting and habitat destruction. Very little is known about the animal. Carl Linnaeus, who taxonomized the species in 1758, used a holotype of unknown provenance, with some suggesting for a time that the specimen’s skull was actually an Indian rhino with a fake horn attached.
Black-fronted parakeetCyanoramphus zealandicus1850
Endemic to Tahiti, the black-fronted parakeet was discovered by Europeans during James Cook’s first voyage in 1769 — when the specimens held in Liverpool and at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring may have been collected. A woodland species with striking violet-blue flight feathers and vibrant red lores, the parakeet survived deforestation, harvesting by Tahitians for handicrafts, and predation by pigs and kiore (Rattus exulans). With the introduction of cats and European rats to Tahiti, the black-fronted parakeet quickly became extinct as these creatures preyed on the birds and their nests, with the last reported sighting in 1850.
Hoopoe starlingFregilupus varius1850
Once populating Réunion, this species of starling is thought to have been first recorded by Étienne de Flacourt of the French East India Company in 1658. It was noted to be delicious by Sieur Dubois in 1674, especially “when it is fat” — a reference to the bird’s summer feeding cycles. As a twentieth-century natural historian elaborated somewhat caustically: “It became very fat in June and July, and may have itself been used for food, for it had none of the usual starling alertness, being so stupid that it could easily be knocked down with a stick.” Despite this same scientist proclaiming the passerine’s extinction to be “an ornithological mystery”, Julian P. Hume argues that extreme deforestation was the cause, with contemporary observers recording mass culling to increase the productivity of farms. (In 1807, for example, Levaillant charged the starling with causing “big damage to coffee trees”.) Eulogizing the bird’s extinction in the mid-nineteenth century, Eugène Jacob de Cordemoy wrote: “I have known the bird you ask me about since childhood . . . . After ten years spent in Paris I did not find a single one in the forests where formerly they flew about in flocks. All ruthlessly destroyed. I shall never forgive myself for the part, slight though it was, which I took in the matter.”
Great aukPinguinus impennis1852
Classed as a flightless alcid, and the only modern species of the genus Pinguinus, this creature gave its name to penguins, as Atlantic sailors believed the latter birds were related to the auk. Historically ranging between eastern North America, Scandinavia, and the Strait of Gibraltar, the great auk mated for life, weighed about five kilograms (eleven pounds), and gurgled when anxious. Human history is tightly entwined with the bird. Its bones have been found around Neanderthal campfires, Native American burial grounds, and it helped European sailors navigate toward the Grand Banks of Newfoundland when adrift at sea. Last officially sighted in 1852, after its swift decline in the hands of harvesters selling its soft down to European clothiers, the bird’s conspicuous absence resulted in novel — though ineffective — protective legislation to be passed in 1753. The long-running ornithology journal The Auk was named in its honor.
Falkland Islands wolfDusicyon australis1876
“We barely knew the warrah”, begins a recent National Geographic feature on the Falklands Islands wolf. It was first sighted by Captain John Strong in 1690, studied by Charles Darwin in 1833, and then, forty years later, was nevermore. The animal had a reputation for foxlike slyness, hence its original French name, loup-renard (wolf-fox). Darwin remembered how one stole “some meat from beneath the head of a sleeping seaman”. While Thomas Huxley classed the Falklands wolf as a coyote, it is closer to the South American fox (itself not a true fox). The only endemic mammal to the Falkland Islands, the wolf was assumed to have crossed on an Ice Age land bridge to the unpeopled archipelago in some prehistoric time. Yet recent genetic research suggests that the animal left its mainland ancestors in the recent geological past (16,000 years ago), and may have been accompanied by human companions. It was hunted to extinction.
QuaggaEquus quagga quagga1883
Named for an onomatopoeic Khoikhoi word for zebra — thought to mimic the creature’s equine call — the quagga was endemic to South Africa until it was hunted to extinction by European settlers in the late nineteenth century. Brown and white striped, it was known to roam in herds of fifty. William Cornwallis Harris, an English military engineer and big game hunter, described the collective movement during its summer migration, unwittingly capturing the quagga’s place in a landscape rich with biodiversity: “Bands of many hundreds are thus frequently seen doing their migration from the dreary and desolate plains of some portion of the interior, which has formed their secluded abode, seeking for those more luxuriant pastures where, during the summer months, various herbs thrust forth their leaves and flowers to form a green carpet, spangled with hues the most brilliant and diversified.” For centuries before extinction, the quagga played an important part in human culture and agriculture, appearing in cave paintings attributed to the San peoples and used to safeguard livestock by Afrikaner farmers. When a hybrid — the offspring of a quagga that was crossbred with a horse — gave birth to striped children, it led to breakthroughs in theories of telegony. Writing in 1889, naturalist Henry Bryden eulogized the loss of the quagga: “That an animal so beautiful, so capable of domestication and use, and to be found not long since in so great abundance, should have been allowed to be swept from the face of the earth, is surely a disgrace to our latter-day civilization.” Extinct by 1900, a stuffed quagga is held by Leiden’s Naturalis Biodiversity Center, where it is trotted out for special occasions.
Portugese ibexCapra pyrenaica lusitanica1892
Half the length of its Pyrenean relative, there remains some debate whether or not the Portuguese ibex was a subspecies or a species of its own. Hunted by mountain-dwelling locals for meat, its ornamental horns, and the seemingly magical stone-like bezoars found in the animal's gastrointestinal tract, its decline tracks the spread and advancement of firearms. “There is little doubt that the Cabro’s only significant enemy was Man”, writes David Day in The Doomsday Book of Animals: A Natural History of Vanished Species (1981). The last known Portuguese ibex died in 1890, although a lone female was spotted near the Serra do Gerês in 1892.
Harelip suckerMoxostoma lacerum1893
A species of ray-finned fish found only in the United States, the harelip sucker has not been seen since 1893. Once considered by fishermen in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee as “the commonest and most valued species of sucker”, it had an olive-colored back, a nonprotractile upper lip, and a notably short head. The reasons for its extinction are uncertain, but scientists suggest that the sucker died off by the siltation of its freshwater habitat through deforestation, which impacted the fish’s ability to see the snails, limpets, and crustaceans on which it fed.
Sooty crayfishPacifastacus nigrescens1900
Once endemic to the San Francisco Bay Area — specifically Alameda Creek, Coyote Creek, and Steamboat Slough — the sooty crayfish was declared extinct in 2010. It probably disappeared earlier, as it was not sighted for the entirety of the twentieth century, vanishing from its native waters as the signal crayfish was introduced, a species that carry a water mold known as crayfish plague. Overharvesting and development of the Bay Area may have also contributed to its demise. It resembled the Shasta crayfish, but was smaller and blacker in color, rarely exceeding two inches (fifty-one millimeters) in size.
Rocky Mountain locustMelanoplus spretus1902
This species of grasshopper was an infamous decimator of prairie farms in the 1870s. One swarm, recorded in 1875 and named after the observing physician Albert Child, was calculated to number between 3.5 and 12.5 trillion insects, encompassing some 198,000 square miles (510,000 square kilometers) of land. A western Missouri historical record remembers how they gave “an earnest and overwhelming visitation, and demonstrated with an amazing rapidity that their appetite was voracious, and that everything green belong to them for their sustenance.” Its taxonomic specific name (spretus) captures the human attitude toward the grasshopper, deriving from the Latin word for “despised”. (Entomologist Charles Valentine Riley invented a recipe for butter-fried locusts during blight, but was met with a public who “would just as soon starve as eat those horrible creatures”.) The swarms, described by one farmer as “like a great white cloud, like a snowstorm, blocking out the sun like vapor”, became a rare site in the twentieth century, due, it is thought, to the expansion and irrigation of farmland and trampling of breeding grounds by livestock. As extinction ripples up and down the animal kingdom, the Eskimo curlew’s critical endangerment (or possible extinction) is thought to stem from the loss of this vital food source. The locust was formally declared extinct in 2014. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) captures the awesome force of these lost locust swarms.
Bulldog ratRattus nativitatis1903
Once endemic to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, the bulldog rat was russet colored, dwelling on hills and in thick forests. The creatures’ demeanor has been described as sluggish — avoiding daylight, for it dazed them, and never climbing into trees or shrubs. They were last seen in 1903, when sailors observed mass die offs, which were later attributed to diseases carried by black rats that had stowed away on colonial ships. Its murine neighbor on Christmas Island, Maclear’s rat (Rattus macleari), followed it into extinction soon after. In March 2022, researchers in Current Biology speculated about a possible pathway toward de-extinction through gene editing, prompting some Jurassic Park style fearmongering in the popular science news.
Black mamoDrepanis funerea1907
Known as the hoa on its Hawaiian island of Molokai — with a fossil record also found on the neighboring Maui — the black mamo was known for its highly decurved bill, often dusted with pollen from lobelia flowers. Killed off by habitat destruction and the introduction of rats and mosquito-borne diseases, the last recorded specimens were captured in 1907, only fourteen years after its first recording by European naturalists. Its Latin name funereal, the same root from which we derive the word “funeral”, tragically hints toward its doomed future. Alfred Newton, who taxonomized the bird, wrote that “Its sombre plumage and the sad fate that too probably awaits the species induce me to propose for it the name Drepanis funerea”. Yet the bird’s behavior was anything but funereal, for it was remembered as a markedly curious creature, which would seek out human proximity and respond to manmade imitations of its call. William Alanson Bryan, who published a natural history of Hawaii in 1915, captured the beauty of the bird’s feeding, before loading his shotgun and killing the last specimens ever collected: “The tongue was inserted with great precision, up to the nostrils, in the flower, while the bird balanced itself on the branches, assuming almost every imaginable attitude in its operations. In all three of the birds secured, the crown was smeared with the sticky purplish white pollen of this lobelia.”
Sloane's uraniaUrania sloanus1908
Named after Sir Hans Sloane, whose private collection helped found the British Museum, this species of moth was endemic in Jamaica until the last reported sighting around 1895. Its neon green, red, and blue coloration was achieved by refracting light off of ribbon-like scales, a warning to predators of its toxicity. The diurnal species lived a migratory existence, known for suddenly vanishing from areas it had previously called home. Scientists speculate that this behavior was a response to plants gradually releasing chemicals to ward off being eaten by caterpillars, accounting for an abnormal death rate observed in wild larvae broods. Sloane's urania may have succumbed to habitat loss after Jamaica’s lowland rainforests were cleared and converted to agricultural land, hindering its nomadic movements.
TarpanEquus ferus ferus1909
A species of small, free-ranging horse from the Russian steppe, it is uncertain whether tarpans were wild or feral creatures, hence their ferus taxonomy. They were first described by the German botanist Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin in 1771 and the last tarpan is thought to have died in captivity in 1909. They varied in color, resembling ancient depictions found in cave paintings made in Europe during the Pleistocene epoch, and some may have carried the “dun gene”, sporting a blue grullo coat. They were hunted to extinction. Many domesticated horses bear phenotypic traits of the tarpan.
Passenger pigeonEctopistes migratorius1914< ※※Indexed under…PigeonsExtinction of Passenger
This wild North American pigeon was named not for its ability to transport passengers, but for its wanderlust tendency to pass by (passager, in the French), before gradually passing out of existence for good, due to hunting and widespread deforestation in the nineteenth century. Living in the deciduous groves of eastern North America and breeding around the Great Lakes, the passenger pigeon’s population at one point numbered between three and five billion. (A similar number range occurs in the dating of its oldest known fossil: from a specimen found in North Carolina estimated to be between 3.6 to 5.3 million years old.) It could reach airborne speeds of sixty-two miles (one hundred kilometers) per hour and caught light in its iridescent neck feathers. Wallace Craig attempted to record a different kind of tonal richness: the male pigeon’s vibrant vocalizations, in musical notation and phonetic imitation, as it moved gently toward its mate: “kee-kee-kee-kee”, “tete! tete! tete!” This chattering call sounded from one of the most social land birds, whose scale of loss is almost inconceivable: at their peak, passenger pigeon populations were about equal in number to all the birds that currently overwinter in North America. To give a sense of this figure, Christopher Cokinos believes that if all of the pigeons flew in a single line, they would have ringed Earth twenty-two times. For fifteen thousand years, before the arrival of European colonizers, Native American land-use practices, it is thought, worked in symbiotic relation with the birds — promoting tree species that produced nuts, acorns, and fruits upon which the pigeons fed.
Maritime explorer Jacques Cartier was the first European to record the passenger pigeon in 1534. Soon after, René Laudonnière, the French Huguenot founder of Fort Caroline, reported killing almost ten thousand pigeons over the course of a few weeks. The advent of railroads and telegraphs facilitated the tracking of flocks as hunting continued to accelerate, due, in part, to the eighteenth and nineteenth century belief that the pigeon had medicinal properties. Its decline was noted by Bénedict Henry Révoil in 1856, who foresaw the pigeon’s fate. “Everything leads to the belief that the pigeons, which cannot endure isolation and are forced to flee or to change their way of living according to the rate at which North America is populated by the European inflow, will simply end by disappearing from this continent”, he wrote. “[I]f the world does not end this before a century, I will wager. . . that the amateur of ornithology will find no more pigeons, except those in the Museums of Natural History.” How right he was. The last recorded wild sighting was around 1900, and the final captive passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. The pigeons were remembered by naturalist Aldo Leopold, who wrote these moving words at the close of World War II: “Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.” Martha’s likeness was painted by muralist John A. Ruthven in 2014.
Carolina parakeetConuropsis carolinensis1918
The Carolina parakeet shares a bleak historical affinity with the passenger pigeon: the species were known to flock together, and four years after the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, Incas — the final captive Carolina parakeet — died in the same cage. This small green bird, with a lemon-yellow head and ruddy face, was the only indigenous parrot to the eastern Midwest and plains states, and one of only three parrots native to the United States. It was first recorded by the English merchant venturer George Peckham in his A True Report of the Late Discoveries of the Newfound Lands (1588). The birds are thought to have been poisonous, due to cats who succumbed shortly after preying upon the parrots. Their voices imbue numerous European colonial travelogues, for the sound of parrots’ cries were inseparable from the soundscape of arrival in the New World: the birdcall of a genus that did not live in Europe. Edward McIlhenny, son of the Tabasco pepper sauce tycoon, attempted to imitate their call: “While on the wing they chatter and cry continually; this cry sounds like ‘qui’ with the rising inflection on the i; this is repeated several times, the last one being drawn out like ‘qui-i-i-i’.” Yet by the nineteenth century, travelers were already noting the mournful silence that signaled their decline. The cause of their extinction is multifold: deforestation, hunting, capture by the pet trade, and competition for nesting sites by introduced species. Known to flock to the site of dead and dying birds, opportunists would exploit this behavior for wholesale slaughter.
Florida black wolfCanis rufus floridanus1934
Once roaming throughout the lower southeast of the United States, the Florida black wolf hunted bison in prairies and pine forests. While initially thought to be a type of coyote, scientific consensus now believes that the animal was a subspecies of red wolf. Jet black, with the exception of white highlights on its chest and snout, this predator was declared extinct in 1908, forced out of its natural habitat by homesteaders pushing into the hinterland, who saw the wolf as a threat to livestock.
Hawaiʻi ʻōʻōMoho nobilis1934
Reportedly common on the Big Island in 1891 and 1892, this yellow-tufted bee-eater had disappeared two years later, which contemporary observers believed resulted from prize hunting and from forest lands being cleared for coffee plantations and browsing livestock. The last specimen was collected in 1902, although a senior Hawaiian ornithologist swears to have heard one hidden amid the flanks of the active volcano Mauna Loa in 1934. Notably timid, the nectivorous ʻōʻō had an extended tongue for probing lobelias and made a hummingbird-like buzzing while hovering. Robert Perkins, who Julian Pender Hume describes as spending weeks on the mountains of Hawaii bare-foot and on horseback, recorded the bird as displaying an aggressiveness that “appears so wanton and unnecessary, and so frequently interrupts its own feeding, that one suspects it must be an ancient habit, which has survived from a time when either nectar-producing flowers were scarcer, or the birds which feed upon them were more numerous.” The islands of Molokai and Maui also were home to species of Moho, which — like the Hawai’ian ʻōʻō — are now extinct.
Thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger)Thylacinus cynocephalus1936
The darkly-striped thylacine was a marsupial, not a tiger, and had many canine characteristics. Formerly it lived on New Guinea and the Australian mainland, but met its end on Tasmania, with the last captive specimen outside of Oceania dying in 1931. Its tigrine features are present in rock art dating back to at least 1000 BCE. Observing the animal’s footprints in 1642, Dutch colonist Abel Tasman described them as “wild beasts having claws like a Tyger”. Surprising settlers by sporting a kangaroo-like pouch, the thylacine’s combination of characteristics led it to be later described as a “dog-headed opossum” by naturalists, and a transformation of the striped archerfish by Kunwinjku Aboriginals. Thought to have been hunted to near extinction by early humans, the last thylacines succumbed to bounty schemes introduced by Van Diemen’s Land Company in the nineteenth century, after thylacines were blamed for the death of sheep, with what is thought to be the final thylacine shot by a farmer named Wilf Batty in 1930. Before extinction, its visual hybridity inspired a wealth of engravings, lithographs, and drawings, collected in Carol Freeman’s Paper Tiger: A Visual History of the Thylacine.
Toolache wallabyMacropus greyi 1939
Slim, graceful, and elegant, this species of wallaby once roamed in Victoria and South Australia. Sociable, they lived in groups, finding homes in swampy areas and foraging sedgeland by twilight. Hunted for their ash-brown pelt, the toolache wallaby population was culled by the introduction of European animal predators to Australia, and further decimated when their habitats were cleared by selectors for agricultural purposes. A final 1920s attempt to save the wallaby ended in disaster when fourteen were accidentally killed by conservationists. The last recorded observation of the wallaby in the wild was in 1924, although there were hopeful — although unconfirmed — reports of sightings during the 1970s.
Bibron's skinkChioninia coctei1940
One of two species of skink named for the French zoologist Gabriel Bibron, Chioninia coctei inhabited the islets of Branco and Raso in the Cape Verde archipelago. One of the largest skink species, it was unique for having tooth crowns that were labiolingually compressed and multicuspate (ridged by cusps and bumps), and notable for its transparent lower eyelid, a mechanism that possibly allowed it to better spot predators on the ground. Its extinction is thought to have been caused by hunting, the introduction of predatory animals, and its harvesting for skink oil by native residents of the nearby islands. Marooned convicts ate a significant portion of the extant population in 1833. It was last observed in 1940.
Arabian ostrichStruthio camelus syriacus1941
Ranging across the Arabian Peninsula, this ostrich species served as a sacrificial offering in Mesopotamia, adorned prehistoric lithic graffiti, and was thought be a fit gift for kings in Tang China. It was disparaged in the Old Testament’s Book of Job — which instead praised the parental stork — for leaving its nest unattended. Romans stewed the ostrich, while its eggs became a peace offering in T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). The introduction of firearms and motor vehicles profoundly tipped hunting expeditions in the favor of humans, leading first to overharvesting and then extinction. Due to its genetic similarity to a North African subspecies of ostrich, attempts are ongoing to reintroduce this animal to the Arabian Peninsula.
Caribbean monk sealNeomonachus tropicalis 1952
Last seen surfacing near the Serranilla Bank in 1952, this monk seal is still sometimes reported by fisherman and divers in Haiti and Jamaica, yet scientific expeditions have failed to confirm the sightings. (It is suspected that the observed animals are hooded seals, not Caribbean monk seals.) While early colonial voyages encountered the species throughout the Caribbean — Christopher Columbus and his crew slaughtered eight of these “sea wolves” for sustenance in 1494 — its populations are thought to have been already diminished by the fifteenth century, relegated to atolls by indigenous hunting activities. Although first recorded by Europeans four hundred years before its extinction, little scientific research was ever conducted on the species. By the nineteenth century, Caribbean monk seals had all but disappeared, overharvested by fishermen, sailors, and sealers who preyed upon the animal’s genetic tameness and lack of natural defenses.
Crescent nail-tail wallabyOnychogalea lunata1956
With a soft and silky pelage limned by rufous tones, this species lived in the scrub of southwestern and central Australia until at least the 1950s. Extremely timid, the crescent nail-tail wallaby was first observed at length by John Gould in 1840, who chose the specific name lunata (lunar) to describe the animal’s crescent markings. In his Mammals of Australia (1863), Gould seems to hint how naturalist specimens of the species, while useful for research, cannot preserve the vitality of the living animal. “It is to be regretted that this as well as other Kangaroos lose the delicate tints of their colouring on exposure to light; so much so in the present instance, that Museum and recent specimens could scarcely be considered as identical.” Known by settlers as a “kangaroo rabbit” and as yiwutta in Arrernte, the animal was frequently hunted and trapped by Aboriginal Australians, but declined rapidly after their habitat was impacted by pastoral expansion and through the introduction of European foxes and feral cats. A related species, the bridled nail-tail wallaby is currently under threat, with an estimated wild population of fewer than five hundred creatures.
Blackfin ciscoCoregonus nigripinnis1969
Until the mid-twentieth century, this species of freshwater whitefish was common in the Great Lakes of North America. Spawning on stony substrate, it was distinct for its green and black coloration, which provided a form of camouflage for these denizens of the deep, who lived at depths of up to six hundred feet (180 meters). Along with the longjaw and deepwater cisco, the blackfin went extinct due to overharvesting by the commercial fishing industry, competition created by introduced species, and predation by introduced alewife, rainbow smelt, and the parasitic sea lamprey, a tubular creature with nightmarish rows of keratinized teeth. Last seen in Lake Huron in 1960 and Lake Michigan in 1969, there is some controversy regarding whether or not the blackfin succumbed to introgressive hybridization — a form of extinction that takes place when an endangered species interbreeds with an abundant population of an adjacent species.
Japanese sea lionZalophus japonicus1970
Declared extinct in the 1970s, this sea lion once traveled the Sea of Japan, frequently seen around the Japanese Archipelago and near the Korean Peninsula. Considered a subspecies of the California sea lion until 2003, these dark gray mammals rested in caves and were harvested for oil, according to an eighteenth-century Japanese encyclopedia, and, later, were captured to serve as circus attractions. Systematic trawling in the early twentieth century killed upwards of fifteen thousand Japanese sea lions — helping to decimate a population that was once forty thousand strong in less than a century. By the 1930s, fishermen were only reporting a few dozen catches per year. While it is possible a few members of the species remain, the sea lion has not been reliably observed in more than fifty years.
BaijiLipotes vexillifer2002
The “functionally extinct” baiji, whose Latin taxonomic designation translates to the “flag bearer left behind”, lived in China’s freshwater Yangtze river system, a catchment area that the cetaceans share with approximately twelve percent of the global population. Even if a few members of the species live on, this population is no longer viable for reproduction and continued survival (a 1991 expedition recorded just thirteen baijis; a 2006 expedition adjusted that number: one or two, maybe, but most likely none). Thought to be the first dolphin species extinguished by humans, the baiji has not been seen for more than twenty years, killed off by industrial pollution and the impact of development on its native waterways — although, as Samuel Turvey notes, “early Chinese records show that river dolphins were actively exploited throughout the country’s history”. Weighing up to 230 kilograms (500 pounds), the baiji could live for twenty-four years in the wild, accelerating away from danger at speeds reaching sixty kilometers (thirty-seven miles) per hour. Like other cetaceans, the species relied on sonar for navigation, socialization, and emotional expression. The baiji served as an important figure of human cultural expression too. “For thousands of years, people along the Yangtze have told stories about how the baiji came to be through poems, stories, and myths”, writes Lydia Pyne in Endlings: Fables for the Anthropocene. “The animals in these stories are mystical and mythical, entwining people and the river together; sometimes, in such tellings, the baiji is cast as a ‘river goddess.’” The baiji did not receive notable attention in the West before 1914, when Charles Hoy, a seventeen-year-old American, shot a specimen and sent its skull to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The animal’s last days are treated at length in Samuel Turvey’s Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin (2009), where, among other chilling anecdotes, we are treated to a third-hand account of how the Great Leap Forward impacted this cetacean species. “Yangtze fishermen have good hearts. . . . But back then — back then it was very difficult. Mao did some terrible things. We had to eat. We thought we had no choice. It was the dolphins, or it was our children. Which would you choose?”
Caspian tigerPanthera tigris virgata2003
Living in the sparse forests and riverine corridors of eastern Turkey, northern Iran, the Caucasus, and western China until the 1970s — and, before the Middle Ages, in Ukraine and southern Russia — this tiger’s extinction is entwined with the Russian colonization of Turkestan in the late nineteenth century. It was hunted for sport; the animal’s preferred reed-bed habitats were converted to cropland for cotton; and the Russian military was used to clear predators from local forests. We know little about their behavior. Conservation attempts were introduced in Tajikistan in 1938 and Iran in 1957. In the early 1970s, naturalists from the Iranian Department of Environment spent years searching for the Caspian tiger, but did not uncover any evidence of their survival. Described by Virgil and Shakespeare, this species of tiger appears more recently in Alex Dehgan’s The Snow Leopard Project and Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation (2009). “The freshness of the Caspian tiger’s extinction was disturbing”, he writes, “we were so close to being its contemporary.”
South Island kōkakoCallaeas cinereus2007
Possibly extinct, this forest bird is endemic to New Zealand’s South Island, notable for its black facial mask and orange wattles, the latter of which distinguish the kōkako from a North Island relative. Last sighted in 2007 — the first authenticated observation since 1967 — the bird’s fleeting song was memorably described by Victorian colonial surveyor Charlie Douglas: “Their notes are very few, but the sweetest and most mellow toned I have ever heard a bird produce.” Males were known to perform an “archangel” display and collectives of kōkako were described in the second edition of Walter Lawry Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand (1888) as preferring to pass through forests on foot, in groups as large as twenty, like a flock of sheep: “if the first bird should have occasion to leap over a stone or fallen tree in the line of march, every bird in the procession follows suit accordingly!” The kōkako’s range was initially impacted by Polynesian forest management, further reduced by the clear-cutting practices of European settlers as well as the introduction of mammalian predators such as ship rats in the 1860s and stoats in the 1880s. Māori traditionally hunted the bird, and it was poached by settlers for sale to collectors and museums in the nineteenth century.
Western black rhinocerosDiceros bicornis longipes2011
Declared extinct in 2011, this subspecies of the black rhinoceros was once widespread in the savannas of Africa, although they concentrated in Cameroon. It was distinctive for the shape of its larger horn, which had a square base, and a long distal limb. Like other rhinos, it had poor eyesight, forming symbiotic relationships with birds such as the red-billed oxpecker, who helped detect threats. The story of the western black rhinoceros’ decline is “a story of greed, indifference, hope and despair”, writes John R. Platt for Scientific American’s Extinction Countdown blog. First came trophy hunters in the early twentieth century, then industrial agriculture, which destroyed large swaths of the animal’s preferred home. And then, like the baiji, the western black rhinoceros (as well as its relatives, the southern and north-eastern black rhinoceros) were surprisingly impacted by the rise of Maoism. In a Cold War effort to promote traditional Chinese medicine over western cures, the powder of rhino horns was marketed as a panacea. Profiting off of this renewed demand, poachers arrived in Africa in record numbers, killing ninety-eight percent of black rhinoceros between 1960 and 1995. By 1997, there were estimated to be only ten endlings left, many living in isolation, making the species functionally extinct. The western black rhinoceros was last seen in 2001 and declared extinct a decade later, the same year that the Javan rhinoceros subspecies in Vietnam disappeared.
Pinta Island tortoiseChelonoidis niger abingdonii2012
A subspecies of the Galápagos tortoise native to Ecuador’s Pinta Island, this animal was presumed to be extinct by the mid-twentieth century due to uncontrolled hunting. The tortoise was first described by herpetologist Albert Günther in 1877, and the differences between subspecies of Galápagos tortoises — adaptations suited to the distinctive environments of their different island homes — helped Darwin formulate his theory of evolution. Like its relatives, the Pinta Island tortoise was known to rest for sixteen hours each day, and could reportedly survive almost six months without food or water. They provided a critical service to the local ecosystem, dispersing seeds and cycling nutrients for other animals and plants — since their extinction, many other species on Pinta Island have suffered from the loss. In 1971, a single male Pinta Island tortoise was discovered and grimly nicknamed Lonesome George. Decades were unsuccessfully spent trying to mate him with other subspecies before his death in 2012. As Michael Blencowe writes, drawing attention to the sometimes oddly unnatural dynamics of conservation in last year’s Gone: A Search for What Remains of the World’s Extinct Creatures: “George lived the life of a celebrity. He had a luxury compound with a pool, he put on a lot of weight and the world became unhealthily obsessed with his sex life.” The same year as George’s death, researchers from Yale found seventeen first-generation hybrids on the neighboring Isabela Island, prompting speculation that perhaps their Pinta Island parents were still extant.
Christmas Island forest skinkEmoia nativitatis2017
Once endemic to Christmas Island, the last known forest skink (nicknamed Gump) died in captivity in 2014. Living in leaf litter and covered by rich chocolate-colored scales, this species of skink was abundant in population as late as 1979. During the 80s and 90s, forest skink numbers plummeted by ninety-eight percent, alongside similar declines in other Christmas Island reptiles, such as the blue-tailed skink, Lister’s gecko, and the coastal skink. The cause is not certain, although researchers think that habitat loss caused by introduced species, such as yellow crazy ants, are to blame. A 2021 paper lists twelve additional possible contributions to the forest skink’s extinction, including predation by other species (giant centipedes, wolf snakes, black rats, and feral cats), use of the insecticide fipronil, disease, and climate change.
Smooth handfishSympterichthys unipennis2020
Declared extinct and then later revised as “possibly extinct” due to insufficient data, the smooth handfish is thought to have been once commonly found off the coast of Tasmania — so much so that it was one of the first species noted by European colonists. Using pectoral fins to walk across the seabed, the fish were described by Zoe Kean on the Guardian’s Age of Extinction channel as resembling “grumpy ageing punks, each spotting a dorsal fin over its head like a mohawk, bulging eyes and a cantankerous expression.” Known primarily from a sole type specimen collected during François Péron’s 1802 colonial survey of Australia, this species of handfish is thought to be the first modern marine fish to have gone extinct, falling prey to environmental changes and unsustainable scallop harvesting and trawl fishing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Ivory-billed woodpeckerCampephilus principalis2021
Native to the bottomland hardwood and temperate coniferous forests of Cuba and the Southern United States, the last universally accepted sighting of an American ivory-billed woodpecker was in 1944, while the last Cuban member of this species was spotted in 1987. Many subsequent sightings of this bird — known to be John James Audobon’s favorite species — have been reported, leading to ongoing claims of rediscovery. Thought to be extinct due to widespread habitat destruction by logging, they once lived on larvae and wild fruits such as hickory nuts and persimmons. They were historically important to Native American groups from the Great Lakes and Great Plains regions, who used their bills for trade and ceremonial crafts. One of the largest woodpeckers in the world, this species had a wingspan of up to thirty inches (seventy-six centimeters). Nancy Tanner, the wife of James Taylor Tanner — the ornithologist often credited as authoring the definitive study on the ivory-billed woodpecker — described the magic of encountering a roosting female: “She looked huge. Her shining black-and-white plumage, white bill, and bright yellow eyes made her very conspicuous.” In the wake of Tanner’s study, several other narratives about searching for this dying species came to press, including Tim Gallagher’s The Grail Bird (2005) and Stephen Lyn Bales’ Ghost Birds (2010). In September 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that the species should be declared extinct — their decision on the matter is due in the coming months.
-----
The stories collected above are informed by Wikipedia’s list of recently extinct animals, Julian P. Hume’s profoundly detailed Extinct Birds, and many other linked resources. We have also benefited from the Guardian’s Age of Extinction series, Scientific American’s Extinction Countdown, and the Remembrance Day for Lost Species project.


text:
James Ensor, The Deadly Sins (ca. 1904)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 24, 2023

Perhaps no modern artist better exemplified the charge issued by Baudelaire in his 1862 essay “Painters and etchers” — “etching is a profound and dangerous art, filled with treachery, which reveals the faults of an artist’s mind as clearly as his virtues” — than James Ensor (1860–1949). Aside from an incomplete course of study at Brussels’ Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, the institution he called an “establishment for the near-blind”, the artist spent the near entirety of his life in the coastal Belgian city of Ostend. Here he lived in his parents’ home into his late fifties, largely financed by his mother and aunt Mimi’s souvenir shop, which sold papier-mâché carnival masks, skeleton costumes, and Asian curios. His early realist and romantic paintings impressed critics, with Russian Music (originally titled Chez Miss) earning him a coveted showing in the 1882 Paris Salon. By the mid 1880s, however, much of his new work was unrecognizable, and his future, once full of promised renown, seemed abruptly foreclosed. A lifelong atheist, Ensor pivoted toward grotesque Christian imagery, not for its theistic content, but because it offered the best symbolic vocabulary for visualizing his growing disgust with the world. Once claiming that he had “anticipated all modern tendencies . . . in every direction”, he now saw, through the mockery of Christ, his own plight to be misunderstood.
It was at this time that Ensor fell in with Les XX — an avant-garde Belgian coterie — and began experimenting with printmaking, creating Christ Mocked, his first etching, in 1886. Asked why he had chosen the medium, Ensor replied that it offered protection against the infidelity of time, offering something like immortality through preservation:
The fragility of paintings frightens me, vulnerable as they are to the mishaps of the restorer, to general hazards, to the distortions of reproductions — I want to live, to speak for a long time yet to the men of tomorrow. I think of solid copper plates, of inks which cannot be altered, of simple reproductions, of faithful impressions, and therefore I have taken etchings as my means of expression.
By Louis Lebeer’s count, Ensor’s oeuvre contains 133 prints: 117 etchings, 14 drypoint intaglios, a single soft-ground etching, and a sole lithograph, illustrating a story by one of his favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. (This last figure does not take into account the many whimsical drawings on lithographic transfer paper for his ballet, La Gamme d’Amour.) And yet, Ensor’s output was cascadic instead of steady. Shortly after creating his 1904 album Les péchés capitaux (The deadly sins), Ensor more or less abandoned printmaking entirely, save for a series of works at a collector’s request in the 1930s.
Drafted in colored chalk and created and retouched over decades, beginning with Lust in 1888, The Deadly Sins are less moralizing depictions of vice, more personal chaffings against petit bourgeois life. In La Paresse (“sloth” or “laziness”), for example, Aunt Mimi has a lie-in while devils prick her jaundiced face and manipulate the hands of a bedside clock. Outside, scything workers harvest crops under the watch of a countenancing sun. The title’s allusion “can only be ironic”, thinks Susan M. Canning, a “sarcastic projection of Ensor’s prickly view of his familial circumstance”, for Aunt Mimi’s work ethic was anything but loafing. Gluttony makes La Grande Bouffe look like a light snack. A pair of men spew vomit while a skeletal butler readies the next course: crab, a lobster that seems to cling in defiance of death onto the tablecloth, and someone’s severed head. A painting behind the diners depicts figures doing possibly shameful things to pigs. Humor livens (though rarely lightens) these torturous scenes. In Wrath, a man bleeds from his eye sockets while a red panda stands on its hindlegs in surprise; the well-dressed woman of Pride fails to notice a giddy reaper playfully tussling her hair.
Drawing on his father’s ancestry, Ensor glossed his satirical etchings as English in inspiration, influenced by caricaturists such as William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and James Gillray, and went so far as to write, in a letter to Pol de Mont of October, 1900, “I feel more English than most of the English artists now slavishly imitating the early Italians.” Unlike his paintings of the late 1800s, which revel in phantasmagoric hellscapes, such as Tribulations of Saint Anthony (1887), and communicate an enduring interest in crowds, as in Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889, The Deadly Sins all focus on small groups and seemingly domestic spaces. The largest and, at first glance, tamest ensemble appears in Envy, where a group of grotesque figures — faces inspired, perhaps, by his family’s stock of masks — stare fixedly upon a breastfeeding woman. Even Ensor’s supporters found some of these themes outlandish. Eugène Demolder, one of his Brussels compatriots and an early critical champion, wrote from Paris with brusque candor: “Your caricatures are not at all appreciated. People find them puerile and common.” The symbolist Emilie Verhaeren offered a different take: “[Ensor] acts as a dilettante of the impossible rather than as an avenger of vice or a master of virtue. He engenders horror elsewhere: He delineates it within himself.”
Only in 1917, after the death of his mother and aunt, did Ensor leave his parents’ house, moving to a residence across the street that he inherited from an uncle, which also had a curio shop on the ground floor. Always a theme in his artwork, toward the end of his life Ensor turned his attention to music, composing only in minor scales as he refused to play the white keys of his harmonium. In August de Boeck’s words, “Ensor knows absolutely nothing about musical technique, but he is a musician.” In 1942, a Belgian radio program broadcast news of his death, even though Ensor would continue to live for a half-decade more, almost reaching the age of ninety. “I am mourning myself”, he would frequently joke in the intervening years.
The images gathered below come from a set of etchings held by the Musea Brugge. The frontispiece above is part of a different set of hand-colored etchings held by the Mu.Zee in Ostend. Additional sets, colored and uncolored, are available on WikiCommons.