--- title: Endangered animals and extinction — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Endangered animals and extinction», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Extinct means gone for ever: when the last animal of a kind dies, no zoo, scientist or wish can bring that kind back. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Endangered animals and extinction # Endangered animals and extinction Lesson 77 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 14 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/0/) — Extinct means gone for ever: when the last animal of a kind dies, no zoo, scientist or wish can bring that kind back. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/1/) — Look at Martha, the stuffed passenger pigeon in her glass case: her kind once flew in flocks of billions that darkened the sky for hours, yet she died alone in a zoo in 1914, so even the commonest animal can disappear. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/2/) — Most extinctions today are caused by people, by cutting down homes, hunting, bringing in rats and diseases, and dropping plastic; the good news is that the same people can protect animals, and tigers in India and Nepal are already increasing. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/3/) — Cartoons draw the dodo as a fat, stupid bird that deserved to vanish; in truth it was well suited to its island, and it died out because sailors' rats, pigs and monkeys ate its eggs. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/4/) — The dodo was a big flightless pigeon from Mauritius, last reliably seen in 1662, less than 100 years after sailors arrived; with no enemies it was not afraid, so sailors hunted it easily, and animals brought by ships ate its eggs. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/5/) — Passenger pigeons lived in flocks of billions in North America, but hunting and the loss of forests wiped them out, and Martha, the last one, died at Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/6/) — The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was a striped, dog-like pouched mammal; farmers blamed it for killing sheep and were paid to kill it, and the last known one died in Hobart Zoo in 1936, and despite many reported sightings there has never been clear proof any survived. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/7/) — Wild tigers live only in Asia; there may have been about 100,000 a century ago and only a few thousand now, but numbers in India and Nepal have grown in recent years thanks to protection. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/8/) — Orangutans live only on Borneo and Sumatra and are critically endangered, as their forest is cut for timber and palm oil; a mother stays with her baby for about 7 to 8 years. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/9/) — Sea turtles, especially leatherbacks that eat jellyfish, can mistake floating plastic bags for food; plastic can block the stomach so the turtle feels full and starves. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/11/) — Rhinos are hunted illegally for horns that some people wrongly believe are medicine, though rhino horn is keratin like hair and fingernails; only two northern white rhinos are left, both female, Najin and Fatu. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/12/) — Many bees have become fewer because of lost wild flowers, some pesticides, disease and changing weather, which matters because about three quarters of the main food crops benefit from pollinators; there are around 20,000 kinds of bee, and most live alone in little holes, not in hives. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/13/) — A fungus disease called chytrid, spread partly by the animal trade, has harmed hundreds of kinds of frogs by attacking the skin they breathe and drink through; the Panamanian golden frog now survives only in breeding centres. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/14/) — The IUCN Red List records how endangered each species is, from least concern through vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered to extinct, and more than 47,000 species on it are judged threatened. - ← previous: [The end of the dinosaurs, and birds as living dinosaurs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/76-end-of-the-dinosaurs-and-birds/) - next →: [Conservation: how people help animals come back](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)