Assemble 192 animals from across the world and you end up holding a conservation list whether you meant to or not. Some of these creatures you could see on a walk. Others have been seen alive by scientists fewer times than I have fingers, and writing their entries was the part of this project that stayed with me longest.
The one that is already gone
Sagittarius holds a quagga, and the quagga is extinct. It was a subspecies of plains zebra, striped at the front and plain brown behind, native to South Africa. Hunting finished it during the nineteenth century, and the last known individual died in Amsterdam in 1883 before anyone had worked out that the wild population was already over. There is something particularly bleak about that gap between the ending and anyone noticing.
Taurus opens on an aurochs, also extinct, though it left more behind. Every domestic cow alive descends from it. The last recorded animal died in a Polish forest in 1627, which makes it one of very few extinctions with a documented final individual and a date attached.
The one that may be
Taurus also holds a kouprey, a wild forest ox from Cambodia and its neighbours, described by science in the 1930s. There has been no confirmed sighting in decades. Surveys keep failing to find it. It is still formally listed rather than declared extinct, and having read a fair amount about it I have come to think that status means something closer to nobody wanting to be the person who says it than to genuine hope.
Conservation status changes, sometimes fast and occasionally in the right direction. Rather than print figures that will be wrong within a year, I describe these situations qualitatively and point you at the source. The IUCN Red List is what I check entries against, and it is searchable by species. It is also a genuinely absorbing thing to lose an afternoon in.
The one nobody has really seen
Taurus holds a saola, and the saola is the strangest thing in the entire bestiary. It was unknown to science until 1992, when remains turned up in Vietnam, making it the first large mammal newly described in over fifty years. It has been photographed alive on very few occasions. People call it the Asian unicorn, and given that this same bestiary contains an actual unicorn two signs along, I would argue the saola is the less believable of the two.
The recoveries, which I think about more
It is not all decline, and the recoveries deserve at least as much attention as the losses.
The Asiatic lion
Leo's ESTP animal survives in one forest in Gujarat, the only wild population left anywhere. In the early twentieth century it was down to a remnant of a few dozen. Protection of the Gir forest brought it back into the hundreds. It is still dangerously concentrated, because one population in one place is one epidemic from catastrophe, but the direction has been upward for a century and that is not nothing.
Przewalski's horse
Sagittarius holds the last truly wild horse, meaning one never domesticated rather than one that escaped and went feral. It was declared extinct in the wild. Every animal alive today descends from a small captive population, and reintroduction to Mongolia has re-established free-ranging herds. A species brought back from having no wild population at all is about as good as this gets.
The Iberian lynx
Leo's ISFJ animal was at one point considered the most endangered cat on earth. Habitat work and captive breeding have improved its position considerably since. It remains conservation-dependent rather than recovered, which is a distinction worth keeping.
The one that came back from the dead
Pisces holds a coelacanth, and this is my favourite story in the whole bestiary.
It was known only from fossils and understood to have died out roughly seventy million years ago. Then in 1938 a museum curator in South Africa named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer went to look at a trawler's catch, as she often did, and found something among it she did not recognise. She was right to trust that instinct. Living populations have since been found in the western Indian Ocean and in Indonesia.
The term is a Lazarus taxon and there are only a handful of convincing examples. A fish presumed gone since before the end of the dinosaurs turning up in a fishing net is the kind of thing an editor would reject in a novel.
Why any of this is in a spirit animal quiz
It was not planned. I chose animals for behaviour, not for rarity, and the endangered ones arrived because unusual behaviour and small range travel together more often than you would like. An animal specialised enough to be interesting is frequently specialised enough to be vulnerable.
This site raises no money for conservation and I would not want to imply otherwise. But if one of these entries sends you to the Red List to find out what happened to the saola, that seems a perfectly reasonable thing for a bestiary to do.
I research and write the Zodiac & Soul bestiary — all 192 entries, the natural history and the mythology behind each one. More about the project on the About page, or say hello via contact.