Vanished Globe shows animals of the last 50,000 years on an old-atlas globe: the giants of the Ice Age, the island animals lost after people arrived, along with the rats, cats and goats they brought, the animals most at risk today, and some brought back from the edge. Drag the timeline: extinct animals stay on the map until their last reliable record.

The Living today layer, off at first, adds common animals that still live where others vanished, often their relatives or old neighbours: the reindeer beside the mammoth, the brown bear beside the cave bear, the red kangaroo beside Diprotodon. They stay on the map at every date, so moving the timeline shows what disappeared beside what remains.

The Legends layer, off at first, adds creatures of myth, legend and belief from many cultures, from the Simorgh, the Homa and the White Div of Iran to the griffin, the qilin and the thunderbird. They are shown as round medallions cut from historic art and marked “legend”, never as cartoons like the real animals, and they are not tied to a date on the timeline. None of them is a real animal; some are sacred in living faiths, and are described as their own traditions and standard reference works describe them.

How sure is this?

Dates of extinction are the last reliable record, not the exact moment an animal died out. For the Ice Age they come from radiocarbon dating and are approximate (“about 10,000 years ago”); scientists still debate many of them, and the causes, which are usually several at once. Each animal is pinned at its last known refuge or best-known place; its card describes its whole range. Endangered statuses are the categories of the IUCN Red List at the time of writing; numbers left in the wild are rounded estimates.

Sources

• Animal facts: compiled for this project from standard sources (museum and university summaries and the Wikipedia article linked on each card); nothing from Wikipedia is stored here.
• Conservation status: category names of the IUCN Red List; no IUCN data or maps are copied.
• Land, coasts, lakes and rivers: Made with Natural Earth 1:10m (public domain), simplified. Coastlines are today’s: during the Ice Age the sea was up to about 120 metres lower.
• Pictures on the cards: from Wikimedia Commons, each under an open licence (public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA), resized and hosted with this site; each picture is credited where it is shown, and all are listed in data/items/credits.json.
• Creatures of legend: compiled for this project from the texts named on each card (such as the Avesta, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Herodotus and the Thousand and One Nights), museum descriptions of the artworks and the Wikipedia article linked on each card. Where traditions differ, the card says so.
• The cartoon animals are drawn for this app, after the well-known reconstructions and photographs.
• three.js r160 and its OrbitControls, © 2010–2023 three.js authors, MIT licence.
• Go fonts (Regular, Medium, Bold, Italic and Smallcaps), © 2016 Bigelow & Holmes Inc., BSD-style licence. Hosted with this site.

Full licence texts: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Privacy

No cookies, analytics, trackers, CDNs or font services of its own. Everything is served from this site (hosted by Cloudflare, which may collect traffic statistics); the only outside pages you can open are a Wikipedia article, a picture’s source page on Wikimedia Commons or its licence, when you tap those links.

Your settings (whether the “Vanishing around” list is open) and whether you have seen the quick guide are kept in your browser’s local storage, on your device only. The guide picks its sample story from your device’s time-zone setting, read in your browser and never sent anywhere. The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which receives your IP address to deliver the pages, as any web host does (Cloudflare privacy policy). Full terms and disclaimer: Terms & notices.

Keys

← → previous and next vanishing · X D V L layers · / search · + − zoom · H whole Earth · Esc close.