📚 Extinct Animals

Loss as a fact of life on earth: the great dying events, the dodo and the quagga, and the question of de-extinction.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject extinct animals in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The Sixth Extinction	Elizabeth Kolbert	2014	18
	Extinct Species	Tamara Green	1996	11
	I wonder why the dodo is dead and other questions about extinct and endangered animals	Andy Charman	1996	9
	Ground Sloths	Joy Frisch	2015	8
	How to become extinct	Will Cuppy	1941	7
	Mermaids and mastodons	Richard Carrington	1957	7
	Bedrohte und ausgerottete Tiere	Vinzenz Ziswiler	1965	7
	Sabertooth Cats	Melissa Higgins	2015	7
	Extinct monsters	Henry Neville Hutchinson	1892	6
	Extinct and vanishing animals	Vinzenz Ziswiler	1967	6
	Dinosaur world	Lambert, David	1981	6
	Lost Animals	Errol Fuller	2013	6
	Air-breathers of the coal period	John William Dawson	1863	5
	Prehistoric Monsters	Kate Brasch	1985	5
	Why Did the Dinosaurs Disappear?	Melvin Berger	1995	5
	No Turning Back	Richard Ellis	2004	5
	The hidden bestiary of marvelous, mysterious, and (maybe even) magical creatures	Judy Young	2009	5
	How to Clone a Mammoth	Beth Shapiro	2015	5
	De-Extinction	Rebecca E. Hirsch	2017	5
	Palaeontology	Richard Owen	1860	4
	Wildlife in danger	Ivah Green	1960	4
	The auk, the dodo and the oryx	Robert Silverberg	1967	4
	The Beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs	Kevin Padian	1986	4
	Prehistoric Animals	Gail Gibbons	1988	4
	Saber-Toothed Cat	Jennifer Zeiger	2015	4
	Tyrannosaurus Rex	Bradley Cole	2018	4
	Stegosaurus	Bradley Cole	2018	4
	Extinct monsters and creatures of other days	Henry Neville Hutchinson	1910	3
	Prehistoric monsters did the strangest things	Leonora Hornblow	1974	3
	The doomsday book of animals	David Day	1981	3

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

FablesFairy TalesFaithFalconryFantasyFarmhouses

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.