1. Species and Starts: Benjamin the Thylacine and Qi Qi the Baiji

Dead. Dead. Almost dead. A species on life support. Extinct. Inevitably going extinct. More dead. Still dead. Just . . . dead.

This is how we tend to frame stories about endlings. The last individual dies, the species becomes extinct; it’s a tragedy, the story goes, a tragedy caused by people doing irreparable harm to nonhumans.

It’s easy to assume that is how stories about endlings have to be told—in no small way because that’s how they have always been told, even before endling was a word. In fact, the very nature of what makes an endling an endling encourages this sort of storytelling, framing endlings around death and extinction. But this sort of story can do endlings a disservice by treating the endling organisms as interchangeable characters whose entire purpose is to die in order to move the story along. This is unimaginative storytelling. It doesn’t offer endlings the narrative intricacy that such a complex organism requires.

Endlings are stories within stories within stories—they are a multitude of beginnings, endings, and everything in between. They are more than just “dead” organisms and tragic tales.

Endlings—as we’ve come to identify them, write about them, and talk about them—begin with Benjamin, the last thylacine.

In historical records, thylacines are often called Tasmanian wolves, tigers, or hyenas due to their dark, distinctive stripes running from behind the shoulders to the tail. Thylacines had short, rounded ears, powerful jaws, and dense, short fur. As marsupials—like kangaroos, koalas, and wombats—female thylacines carried their joeys in a back-opening pouch. Hunting mainly at night, thylacines pursued prey like other marsupials, small rodents, and birds that lived at the edges of their woodland habitats. Life expectancy of a noncaptive thylacine was something like five to seven years.

Although “endlings” might have originated with Benjamin, Benjamin’s story actually starts much earlier than the 2001 Tangled Destinies exhibit in the National Museum of Australia. Earlier than his death in 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Tasmania. Much earlier than the decades of debate about whether or not his species is really, truly, completely, and absolutely extinct. (Unconfirmed sightings of thylacines persist even today.) The story of Benjamin is older, even, than the arrival of European settlers in what is now called Australia and Tasmania in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The real origin of Benjamin’s story is roughly eighteen million years ago, during the Miocene, when several thylacine species were found across Australia, Tasmania, and as far north as what is now Papua New Guinea. Fast-forward millions of years and several thylacine species could still be found on the mainland of Australia, until a little over three thousand years ago, when those species became extinct. Researchers cite multiple pressures for the extinction of thylacines on mainland Australia—pressures like changes in human land use, fire regime, and hunting practices, competition pressure from the dingo, and an abrupt shift in climate due to the El Niño Southern Oscillation.1

Thylacines appear in ancient Aboriginal rock art at several locations in Australia. Some of the petroglyphs—estimated to be thousands of years old—show thylacines nursing joeys and feeding their young. One petroglyph from Australia’s Northern Territory even depicts a thylacine with a three-pronged hunting spear in its back.2 Some archaeologists suggest that thylacines in rock art—especially at the red rock of Murujuga, the largest archaeological site in the world—were a way that Aboriginal peoples documented an extinction even as they were witnessing it, as thylacine populations died out across Australia thousands of years ago.3

Oral histories from the Adnyamathanha peoples in the Flinders Range of South Australia suggest that thylacines could even have survived in the area into the 1830s.4 “Today marrukurli [thylacines] are known only as mammals of the Dreaming. That is, there is no one living who claims to have seen one,” linguist Dorothy Tunbridge noted in her work with the Nepabunna Aboriginal School, documenting the names of Flinders Range animals in the Adnyamathanha language. “Both the Dreaming and other oral tradition, however, suggest the possibility of their bodily existence in the region in the not-too-distant past.”5

Benjamin’s species—Thylacinus cynocephalus—was present across Sahul (the landmass that includes New Guinea, mainland Australia, and Tasmania) from around 2 million years ago and survived several thousand years longer in Tasmania than it did on mainland Australia. When Tasmania became isolated from Australia with the appearance of the Bass Strait, roughly twelve thousand years ago, the island’s geographic isolation became a refugia for a plethora of species like the thylacine. (Thus ensuring that such species survived at least into the nineteenth century.)6 Historical estimates suggest that there was a population of roughly five thousand thylacine individuals when European explorers arrived on Tasmania—what is called Iutruwita in Palawa kani, a contemporary reconstructed Tasmanian language—before those languages and their peoples were exterminated.7

Most of what we know about thylacine behavior comes from colonial-era records from what was then the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land. (The colony was renamed “Tasmania” in 1856 with the cessation of transported convict labor the year before.) Some of these thylacine observations were accurate, some not; many were embellished and exaggerated by the time they reached scientific circles back in Europe. Early nineteenth-century naturalists working on the island were prickly about the misinformation about the area’s flora and fauna they saw in print. The famous nineteenth-century French naturalist Georges Cuvier, for example, described the thylacine as a marine predator, despite scant field evidence for the claim.8

Unfortunately, there are no nineteenth-century records written by Aboriginal Tasmanian peoples, or then-contemporary interviews, about their thoughts regarding thylacines. The primary source of written records that describe interactions between Aboriginal Tasmanian peoples and thylacines was created by an English amateur anthropologist George Augustus Robinson in the 1830s. (It is important to note that any discussion of Robinson’s historical legacy needs to consider his actions in 1832 that forced what remained of the island’s Aboriginal Tasmanian peoples to relocate to the nearby Flinders Island. The devastation of Aboriginal populations between 1832 and 1838 has been described by historians as genocide.9) Robinson’s records showed that different Aboriginal communities interacted with and viewed the thylacine in a plethora of ways. However, none of the recorded Aboriginal Tasmanians’ encounters with thylacines showed the animals to be reviled and hunted the way they would come to be with European settlers.10

By the mid-nineteenth century, thylacines were quickly becoming animals—objects, really—of dread among the British colonists and were viciously exterminated as such. Thylacines were viewed with suspicion and terror, living in settler lore as blood-sucking vampires or a fearsome werewolf-like creatures. (There are occasional references to thylacine blood-feeding in scientific literature that persisted into the mid-twentieth century; but, by and large, “vampire thylacines” were something that existed only in the minds of European settlers.) To those settlers, thylacines were a malevolent and almost mythical creatures.11

The colonial government formally issued a bounty for thylacines in 1888—one pound for adult thylacines and ten shillings for juveniles. In order to collect the bounty, a person had to produce the skin of the thylacine with the head, scalp, and paws still attached; once the skinned thylacine was validated by a colonial official, a hole was punched in the arm of the skin.12 (Ostensibly, this would ensure that no one could claim a bounty on the same thylacine skin more than once.) In the 1880s, the skin of one adult thylacine would be worth three days’ wage for a skilled tradesperson. (In 2017, this was worth approximately £66.18 as 3 days’ wage for a skilled tradesperson would be, roughly, $100.) Contemporary historians and scientists note that the thylacines did not, in fact, pose as much a threat to setters’ sheep—a popular reason given for eradicating the thylacines—as settlers might have liked to think they did.

Although the bounty scheme was officially disbanded in 1909—spurred by concerns about the rarity of the animal, its potential extinction, and a growing horror at the slaughter of Tasmanian animals—the damage to the species was irreversible. Between the introduction of species that competed with thylacines (like wild dogs), diseases like mange (disease wiped out sixteen of the seventeen thylacines at the Melbourne Zoo by 1903), and extensive habitat destruction due to settlers’ unsustainable farming and sheep-raising, to say nothing of the thousands of thylacines killed outright by humans (historical estimates suggest that settlers killed around 3,500 individuals), the species inevitably went extinct in the first half of the twentieth century.

The treatment of the thylacine—the story of the species and the first steps toward its extinction, the beginning of its end—is colonial violence in a microcosm.

And this brings us to Benjamin. By 1934, the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart had the last captive thylacine of the last thylacine species in the world. Two years later, thylacines would be considered extinct.

The first record of a thylacine on public display appears in the Hobart Town Courier on the September 17, 1831. (“A beautiful specimen of the male TIGER of Van Diemen’s Land, is now to be seen at George Marsden’s Livery Stables [opposite to Mr. Swan’s] Elizabeth Street. No live Tiger has ever been exhibited or seen in Hobart town before.”13) By 1850, a plethora of thylacines had been exported to zoos—and zoological gardens—throughout mainland Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom, North America, and India. Historical estimates suggest that something like 224 individual thylacines could be found at fourteen international zoos, although finding specific records make it difficult to pin down an exact number.

In the 1920s, many of the animals on display at the Beaumaris Zoo came from the private animal collection of Mrs. Mary Grant Roberts, who championed the welfare of Tasmania’s fauna, particularly its birds and thylacines. (When Mrs. Roberts spoke to the Hobart Daily Post on October 30, 1909, she described “the rare and handsome Tasmanian tigers” as a “species now almost extinct.”14) After her death in November 1921, her menagerie was presented to Hobart City Council—with the agreement that the Tasmanian government would offer a subsidy toward its upkeep. The city council relocated the zoo to the Queens Domain in the city and hired Arthur Reid to be the animals’ curator. Reid was assisted for years, unofficially, by his daughter Alison.15

By 1931, the zoo had only one remaining thylacine on exhibit. That same year, the Hobart City Council Reserves Committee (the committee that oversaw procurement and logistics of the zoo’s animals, among other city businesses) was able to procure a second thylacine—this second animal would come to be known as Benjamin. Minutes from the committee are not preserved between 1932 and 1934, so details about the animal’s provenance, age, and sex have been lost. Upon the thylacine’s arrival at Beaumaris, Australian naturalist David Fleay took some photographs and filmed the animal for about sixty-two seconds; Fleay promptly received a bite on his own, human hindquarters for his troubles.

When Arthur Reid died in December 1935, the misogynistic Hobart City Council Reserves Committee, under the direction of Bruce Lipcombe, refused to employ a woman as curator, despite the fact that Reid’s daughter, Alison, was more than qualified. Her expertise was indispensable to the zoo and the health of the animals. The Reserves Committee allowed Alison and her mother to live in the curator’s cottage on the zoo’s grounds rent-free, as long as Alison was willing to continue to work—unpaid.16

Alison took their offer. The effectiveness of her work, however, was severely curtailed when the committee appropriated her keys to the animals’ enclosures and only allowed her to work during the zoo’s “normal business hours.” (This was problematic, as animals’ care and welfare could not necessarily be neatly slotted into the seven hours the zoo was open. Some animals, for example, were nocturnal.) When the Reids’ financial situation became truly grim, the council begrudgingly offered a small gratuity as payment to them for an assault that Arthur Reid had suffered years prior thwarting poachers at the zoo.

Over the next year and a half, decisions the Reserves Committee made were disastrous to the animals at the zoo, despite Alison Reid’s heroic, ceaseless attempts to advocate for the animals. Cages went uncleaned. Animals were underfed or left to eat the previous day’s rotten food before being fed again. Veterinary treatments were denied, citing cost. Employees were unmotivated and careless. Animals died. Whether the committee’s decisions were made from indifference, apathy, or hollow-ringing attempts of frugality, the effects were the same. Alison protested, wrote letters, demanded keys, and, ultimately, was fired from her unpaid job.

By winter 1936, the situation was dire for both Alison and the zoo’s animals. Dismissed and turned out of her home in the midst of the raging Great Depression, Alison was completely powerless to do anything more listen to the nightly distress calls of the zoo’s carnivores. The thylacine, a Bengal tiger, and a pair of lions were frequently shut outside, left in the open to face the cold, rain, and snow of Hobart’s particularly severe winter without covering, protection, or access to their dens. Those in charge—specifically, the men in charge—simply could not be bothered. In interviews recorded decades later, Alison’s voice still choked with emotion, describing the cruelty and neglect of the animals’ conditions.

Finally, on September 7, 1936, in the freezing night air and locked out of its den, the world’s last known thylacine died. Fifty-nine days earlier, the government of Tasmania extended an official protected status to the species, but it was too little, too late. Incidentally, the zoo went defunct in 1937.17

Bruce Lipscombe reported to the Reserves Committee the following week that “the body [of the thylacine] had been forwarded to the Museum,” per the committee’s minutes.18 But it appears that the Museum was uninterested in Benjamin and made no effort to reserve any part of it, so confident were they that other thylacines remains could be obtained. (The skin that appeared in the 2001 Tangled Destinies exhibit, called the Old New Land exhibit until it closed in 2020, was from a different thylacine individual.) The material remains of Benjamin, like his species writ large, are gone.

On February 10, 1937, the Fauna Board—a conservation and wildlife organization, under the direction of naturalists J. E. C. Lord, Joseph Pearson, and A. K. Butler—made the decision to publicize the extinction of the thylacine in the hopes that it might generate some reliable sighting or information about the continued existence of the species. The subsequent radio and newspaper campaign yielded nothing that could be substantiated; indeed decades of rumors and attempts to find thylacines have been futile for almost ninety years.

The thylacine species, Thylacinus cynocephalus, was eventually declared extinct by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 1982 and by the Tasmanian government four years later in 1986. “The absence of presence was officially declared as the presence of absence,” environmental historian Dolly Jørgensen summarized the thylacine extinction. “While there has been official agreement on the end of the thylacine, sighting reports continue to this day.”19

Although we talk about the thylacine endling today as “Benjamin,” that part of the story comes decades after the animal’s death. Curiously—almost unbelievably—“Benjamin” was born via a radio interview in 1968 when Frank Darby, a Victoria resident with no apparent ties to zoos or wildlife conservation, gave an interview with famed Australian naturalist Graham Pizzey. In the interview, Darby asserted that he had been the keeper of the last thylacine at the zoo in Hobart and claimed that the zoo had used “Benjamin”—“Benjy”—as a pet name for the thylacine. “He said he used to feed Benjy a live rabbit night and morning,” a May 1968 newspaper article quoted Darby as saying. “He was tame, could be patted, but was morose, and showed no affection.”20

Every single detail Darby offered about the zoo and the thylacine were wrong. Demonstrably, completely, and utterly wrong. The thylacine was female (per interviews and a careful examination of historical photographs, although recent analysis of Fleay’s film footage has raised more questions about the thylacine’s sex than it answers), the zoo was not in the business of offering its carnivores live prey (this would have been a huge ethical breach, even in the 1930s), and the enclosure was a different layout from his description (it was smaller than what Darby described).21 For decades, Alison Reid and others have consistently pointed out that the plethora of falsehoods in Frank Darby’s thylacine claims, including that no one, ever, had called the thylacine “Benjamin.”

It’s astonishing to consider how much and how little we know about Benjamin. We know “he” was an endling. That his species extinction was the result of colonial cruelty and environmental carelessness. That “he” is now called “Benjamin” and “Benjamin” quickly became an icon for environmental conservation in Australia. And, in recent decades, we know “Benjamin” was the endling that made people sit up and take stock of what the word endling afforded the us in terms of Anthropocene storytelling.

And yet the mythos of Benjamin endures and grows—at this point, perhaps more myth than history, more story than science. What is undeniably true, however, is that “Benjamin” is a set of interlinked and nested stories that, like all good stories, offers its audiences a way to think about extinction and loss of species in nuanced ways.

Species are a human construct.

At its most basic, a species is a category. It’s a way of grouping similar populations of individuals together. Over the past few millennia, we’ve continuously divvied and re-divvied living things into categories of individuals that are “most alike” in order to describe different populations of organisms on earth; naming and categorizing species is called taxonomy. According to historians and philosophers of biology, Western intellectual traditions have been working with the idea of “species” since Plato and Aristotle. (Plato’s student Theophrastus [ca. 372–287 BCE], for example, created the first systematic attempt to classify the botanical world, classifying plants based on shape of plant parts as well as by their practical, everyday uses.) If we’re going to define endlings as the last individuals of a species, it’s worth unpacking what a species is.

The modern—and even medieval—word for “species” is a Latin translation of the Greek word eidos; this has, in turn, translates into “idea,” “kind,” “sort,” or “form.”22 It’s crucial to note that thinking about and creating categories in the natural world isn’t solely the purview of modern, Western science. How we talk about species—indeed the history of “species concepts”—tilts heavily toward traditional Western sources, despite a plethora of work in non-Western cultures to systematically classify organisms.

Historically, “species” draws from Plato’s definition of Form (again, eidos) that emphasizes how a form is unchanging and separated from similar forms. Perhaps more than anything else, Plato’s system of classifying forms by following a binary system of contraries—what we might, today, call a decision tree—informs how we think about species on earth. With enough questions, and enough characteristics, we can find what separates one form from another.

Over the ensuing centuries, natural philosophers—like Pliny the Elder, Porphyry, and Boëthius—pushed this concept further into the types and things that a form could entail, specifically using the term genos (“genus” today) as a broader category for classification than eidos or species. Interestingly, within this classifying logic, species do not begin because their form is a universal constant thing. By the Middles Ages, “species” populated medieval bestiaries, which were often moral homilies as well as herbal pharmacopeia that carefully noted plants that could be used for medicinal or culinary reasons. In those instances, describing “species” wasn’t simply an act of classifying organisms for the sake of classifying organisms; they documented how people interacted with and used nonhuman species like plants.

Additionally, folk taxonomies, for example, have long offered important, legitimate ways of describing “species” that might not easily slot into how a species has been defined historically; they depend on everyday, social knowledge.23 “The folk taxonomy of the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, for example, labels both local conifer species ‘pine,’ yet identified five different subspecific varieties of their most important food plant: corn (Zea mays),” botanist Nanci Ross offers by way of an example. “Classifying is integral to our understanding of our world.”24

Historically, how we think about species can be roughly divided into two major parts: prebiology and postbiology. Specifically, seventeenth-century English naturalist John Ray claimed species ought to be classified based on similarities and differences rather than preconceived notions of forms. By the time Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) formalized binomial nomenclature in 1735—the genus-species system we use today for naming organisms—“species” were things to be found, described, and categorized in the natural world. Fast-forward to Darwin and evolutionary theory (and what we might see as “biology”) and species could be understood as things in process. And if species were a process, they could begin and end.

Like any category, though, what makes a species a species is ultimately a set—sets—of human decisions made and remade over time. In contemporary scientific literature, there are twenty-six formal—and different!—definitions for what a “species” is.25 (Some species concepts emphasize the historical, evolutionary element of a lineage; some emphasize the affinities of genes between organisms; nondimensional species concepts, like folk taxonomies, emphasize different everyday interactions and knowledges, depending on cultural contexts.26) For practical purposes, species are pragmatic and necessary for the business of doing science as well as conservation legislation. Species allow scientists to analyze how populations of organisms change over time, to note new organisms (newly discovered species), and, of course, mark their extinction.

But—and this is key to thinking about endlings—species are also narrative. Species have a beginning, a middle, and an end—in effect, an origin, a life history, and an extinction. (For many extinct species, they also have an afterlife; they are memorialized, commemorated, celebrated, or even mourned.) The narrative of a species offers endlings their very outermost layer of story. We couldn’t have species without endlings or endlings without species. It’s how and why Benjamin’s story actually starts some 18 million years before the Beaumaris Zoo.

Although species have all of these narrative elements—a beginning, a middle, and an end—those points are notoriously difficult to pin down both biologically and literarily. It turns out, for example, that even an endling needs an origin story. So what would that beginning look like? When does a species begin? When does it end? What sorts of origin stories and conclusions will we find? Which will be cast as tragic heroes in the face of the sixth mass extinction? How much does one inform the other?

We might have invented a word to mark the end of a species but finding the origin of one is an altogether different question. There isn’t a begin-ling or equivalent word to frame how we think and write about species’ biological beginning; what’s more, it turns out that finding the literal origin of a specific species is impossible. (Contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton offers, “so dire is the paradox of evolution that Darwin should have used some kind of wink emoticon, had one been available, and scare quote: The ‘Origin’ of ‘Species’.) The punchline of Darwin’s book is that there are no species and they have no origin.”27 Morton’s point is about the arbitrariness of human-created categories and how difficult those categories—origins, species—are to define when you get right down to it.

For most extinct species, what we see in the fossil record is actually the middle of a species’ story. We typically don’t find the exact beginnings or precise endings of ancient species, although paleontologists use terms like First or Last Appearance Dates to connote when a species is first observed in the fossil record or when it drops out of view. But First and Last Appearance Dates are arbitrary markers in a species’ evolutionary story; they tell us more about the conditions that preserve fossils than they necessarily do about when and how ancient species lived and died.

Consequently, we tend to tell a species’ origin story not through its evolutionary beginning but, rather, through its cultural one. We use the discovery of a fossil species as the narrative point of “origin” to tell the story of a particular species. For long-extinct species, we read their species’ stories as opening—for us, anyway—in media res, in the middle and at the moment of their discovery.

Each of those episodes—those beginnings, those middles, those endings—offers another matryoshka doll–like story nestled into an endling’s ethos. This temporal depth—these multitudes of stories—make an endling more than just a character going extinct, more than just “dead.” It folds them into an Anthropocene canon of stories; many endling extinction stories are only a generation or two removed from living memory.

In 2006, an international team of scientists working with the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology carried out an extensive survey along roughly one thousand miles of the Yangtze River in central China. The team was looking for baiji—Lipotes vexillifer—a freshwater dolphin endemic to river’s unique ecosystem. Like its fellow river dolphins around the world, the baiji were characterized by long thin beaks filled with sharp teeth and by poor eyesight.

Over six weeks, from November to December of 2006, the team traveled down the river on two research vessels, from Yichang to the Three Gorges Dam to Shanghai and finally the Yangtze Delta before traversing their way back. Using optical instruments and underwater microphones, the scientists systematically and methodically tried to find any last remnant of the species that had lived in Yangtze River for millennia.

“We passed slowly between soggy mud banks heavy with wet grass and the skeletons of trees . . . in front of the ship everything faded into a grey void. It was completely silent. We stood vigilantly on deck, peering out into the blankness. Everything felt poised and expectant,” British conservation biologist Samuel Turvey wrote of his experience on the 2006 survey, “. . . and then, ahead of us, the end of the side-channel condensed out from the grey air. We had seen nothing.”28

For thousands of years, people along the Yangtze have told stories about how the baiji came to be through poems, stories, and myths. 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 majority of baiji stories invariably contain an element of metamorphosis—the river changed a person from one state of being (human) into another (baiji or porpoise).

The baiji remained unrecognized to the Western world until 1914, when seventeen-year-old American Charles Hoy shot one near Chenglingji, in a water channel connecting the Yangtze with Dongting Lake. Hoy cleaned the skull and some vertebrae, and then sent the bones back to the United States where they ended up at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. (The Smithsonian was so impressed with Hoy’s ability to procure “exotic” animals that the institution sent him to Australia a few years later to acquire specimens. Incidentally, Hoy died in 1922 from schistosomiasis from a flatworm he picked up from the Yangtze River.)

In the mid-century decades after the end of China’s civil war, Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” for the People’s Republic emphasized industrialization on a gargantuan scale—with that came forest and habitat destruction, such as the large dams that were put along the Yangtze, which splintered fish and baiji populations. Local Chinese who lived along the Yangtze were starving, and baiji—like many of the river’s animals—were a source of food.

The Yangtze Freshwater Dolphin Expedition in 2006 concluded that, although it was possible that they had missed one or two baiji, the species was likely to be extinct. The species was functionally extinct, in other words. In their scientific publication, the team pointed to unsustainable by-catch in local overfishing, habitat degradation, severe pollution, and noisy shipping lanes that interfered with the dolphins’ sonar (the Yangtze is one of the world’s busiest waterways and is home to more than 10 percent of the world’s human population) as contributing factors to the baijis’ extinction. New methods of fishing—like electrifying the waters—were catastrophic for baiji. Like many threatened and endangered animals, the story is sadly familiar. (The Chinese paddlefish [Psephurus gladius], for example, may have also become extinct along this same timeline for very similar reasons.)

In 1980, one of the last few baiji was rescued from the river, given the name 淇淇 (Qi Qi—pronounced chee chee in English), and taken to the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology. Qi Qi was part of conservation efforts to save the Lipotes vexillifer species, and Qi Qi became a bit of a national celebrity. In 1986, two additional baiji—a female called Zhen Zhen and an unnamed male—were brought to the Institute. The male died within a few weeks of his arrival at the Institute, but the Institute had hopes that Zhen Zhen would be able to mate with Qi Qi. She died, however, before reaching sexual maturity.

And then there was just one. Just Qi Qi who, by some accounts, became so used to humans that he enjoyed being hauled out of the water. Almost all existing photographs of the baiji species are of Qi Qi in captivity in Wuhan. When Qi Qi died in 2002—of diabetes and old age—he had been in captivity for twenty-two years. His funeral was broadcast on national television.29

What are the stories of endlings like Benjamin and Qi Qi about?

Extinction, of course. They’re about how millions of years of evolutionary history ends. And hubris. They’re about ignorance, negligence, misogyny, colonialism. Name the sin and the odds are good that we can find it in the thylacine and river dolphin stories somewhere. They’re stories about how we humans took species and we spent them. Carelessly.

We have the beginnings of one million endlings in the making—some species are closer to their endling than others, some critically so. As of 2022, species like the Sumatran rhino are estimated to have fewer than eighty individuals; the Māui dolphin has fifty-four; in the southeast United States, there are eighteen to twenty-five known red wolves in the wild (235 to 250 are in human care); there are fewer than ten vaquita individuals that live in the northern Gulf of California; there are three or four Yangtze softshell turtles in China and Vietnam.30 (Most of these examples have decreased in their tiny population size between drafts of this book and counts had to be updated during the editing process. It is safe to assume that by the time you read this, we will be ever closer to endlings for these species.) Whether we name the individual or not—whether we know the individual or not—all of these relict species will come to their eventual endling and go extinct. To say nothing of the extinct of thousands of species that we haven’t even yet “discovered” or named. We’re writing a new set of endling stories, each one its own nested set of stories about beginnings and endings.

Fatu and Najin—northern white rhinos—are perhaps, the most famous “almost-endlings” in the world. They’re a subspecies of white rhinoceros that once ranged across central Africa, including parts of Uganda, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Decades of poaching have decimated the northern white rhino population as their horns are sold at astronomical prices on black markets.

For the past decade or so, we’ve marked the decline of the northern white rhino one individual at a time. The last white rhinos spent most of their lives in Europe, not Africa. In 2009, four individuals—Sudan, Suni, Najin, and Fatu—were sent to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya from the Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic. (The Dvůr Králové Zoo has an extensive and successful breeding program for African ungulates.) Suni, a male, died in 2014. Sudan died in 2018. Now Fatu and Najin live under armed guard at Ol Pejeta Conservancy, like Sudan did, to protect them from poachers. “Sudan is an extreme symbol of human disregard for nature,” Jan Stejskal, director of international projects at the Dvůr Králové Zoo said, upon the rhinoceros’s death in 2018. “He survived extinction of his kind in the wild only thanks to living in a zoo.”31

One of the ways that the stories of endlings are changing is how they are told to connect with their audiences. To make it personal. Certainly, this was true when Sudan died on March 19, 2018, and headlines around the world tolled for the ever closer, ever inevitable extinction of the northern white rhino. What did I do the day that he died? Looking back at my calendar, I went rock climbing. I picked up a prescription at the pharmacy. I was working on a couple of freelance articles and thinking about a new book project. And, then, the next day, I read in the New York Times that Sudan had died. Sudan’s death—another reminder of the northern white rhinoceros’s coming fate—made everything else seem downright banal. Time will tell who the northern white rhino endling will be.

“Last individuals—like Lonesome George, Martha the Passenger Pigeon, and Benjamin the Thylacine—continue to be central to the way in which popular commentary represents extinction,” philosopher Thom Van Dooren offers. “These last individuals come to stand in for their whole species and sometimes the broader fact and possibility of extinction, in a way that lends persuasive power, but also creates important historical and ethical distortions.”32

What can the stories of endlings and almost-endlings do, here in the twenty-first century, if species keep going extinct and will for the foreseeable future?

Today, we might like to tell ourselves that we tell endling stories as an act of memorializing. Perhaps even penance. Conceivably, we tell stories about endlings as proof that we’re repentant about the harm that we humans have caused, with hope that, maybe, we could do a little better. Perhaps telling and retelling endling stories is about contrition; perhaps it’s catharsis. We’ve learned our lesson, we would like to tell ourselves, and we’ll be more careful in the future.

Other species—other endlings—might beg differ.