Recently Extinct Animals and Plants in North America

Listed in the table below are plants and animals that endangered species experts have confirmed or believe to be recently extinct.

The list covers extinctions since 1960 of species, subspecies and populations in Canada and the continental United States.

This list of North American extinctions is not intended to be comprehensive.

Some recent extinctions are undoubtedly missing due to the incompleteness of available information. Not all tallies of scarce plants and animals are kept up-to-date or recorded in databases. For certain organisms, little documentation exists on their populations and ranges, particularly for invertebrates and nonvascular plants. As well, it may take several years of unsuccessful searching before scientists conclude that a species did indeed become extinct.

At times species have even been lost before they were ever known to science. For example, after whitefish in Dragon Lake, British Columbia were eradicated in 1956, it was discovered from preserved specimens that, not one, but two unique species of Coregonus had lived in the lake.

On the other hand, occasionally a species that was once feared extinct gets rediscovered decades later. The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) is a recent and well-known case of stumbling upon a lost species. There are other such finds, including Utah's autumn buttercup (Ranunculus aestivalis) rediscovered in 1982 and the Wyoming toad (Bufo baxteri) found again in 1987.

Further muddying any definitive list of extinctions are the disagreements among taxonomists as to whether a certain group of organisms is indeed a separate species or subspecies. New information can result in scientific classifications getting shifted around. The above list of recently extinct animals and plants is based upon information available as of September 2007.