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@user-kc5cs9yk1c

2 ай бұрын

I was not aware of this creature. Thank you.

@thecliffdweller1212

2 ай бұрын

Simon, I was enlisted in the US Coast Guard and served in the Bering Sea patrols in the 1970s. I saw the Steller Sea Lion in the wild. In fact, one popped up just 50 yards from the ship and was mistaken for a man-overboard by the lookouts.

Man, the part about them huddling around their injured to shield them was seriously heart breaking.

As a great writer once said, "Darwin was wrong. Man is still an ape." Although that hardly seems fair to the apes.

@illustriouschin

2 ай бұрын

Nah, most apes are just as bad as humans, they merely lack the technology to be bad as prolifically as humans.

@MetalHippie83

2 ай бұрын

Love this comment. Very Douglas Adams esque vibes.

@jandrews6254

2 ай бұрын

And chimpanzees (apes) can be quite vicious amongst themselves, committing murder and infanticide and cannibalism, treating each other brutally, especially amongst the males. Male chimps also hunt and eat monkeys, and they are all capable of using stones and sticks as tools to dig up ants, break shells, or each others heads. Yes Homo sapiens are still apes.

Simon yesterday: updates on the horrors of war and civilian death Simon today: mermaids

@Luziferne

2 ай бұрын

May I correct that… Simon yesterday: updates on the horrors of war caused by the Human greed against themselves Simon today: updates on the horrors of war caused by the Human greed against themselves, every other species in reach & maybe… mermaids

@TodayIFoundOut

2 ай бұрын

Just wait until you see Wednesday's topic!!! 😋 -Daven

@AdamKipling-vc1oh

2 ай бұрын

😂😂😂

@JootjeJ

2 ай бұрын

Today's Simon makes me even more depressed than yesterday's.

@AdamKipling-vc1oh

2 ай бұрын

@@JootjeJ daddy chill

I was like "awww, how could they do that to those poor sea cows?"'. Then you said it tasted like tender steak....."oh".

Passenger Pigeons: in mid 1800s they killed such a large number at their nesting grounds: they filled many traincars full of them (as the story goes)....the traincars not being refrigerated, they rotted before getting to the destination/market. So, they had to dump the whole trainload of pigeon corpses: Likely several million.... A few decades later...they went extinct: to nobodies surprise.

Nothing can quell the hunger of human beings except the dirt of the grave.

@indridcold8433

2 ай бұрын

Death is the great equaliser. It is perpetual peace. I look forward to returning to nonexistence. I have no complaints about when I was nothing. I did not exist to remember it nor experience it. I think it would be great to be dead; well, in a manner of speaking, since nothing could effect me, because their will simply not be a me.

I like the casual mention of the chestnut in the segment on the passenger pigeon. The tree would almost follow suit half a century later.

@InternetDarkLord

2 ай бұрын

Fortunately, a few chestnuts are left. Every once a blue moon, I see one.

finishing off last interbred isolated population of animal that's already well on its way to extinction is one thing, but being the sole cause for disappearance of thriving species of uncountable millions of birds is like a whole different level...

I remember reading once that the Dodo was not actually very tasty, and people were more interested in the feathers.

@stephanybrown3226

2 ай бұрын

The meat was said to be very tough and greasy. While one reason it was hunted could have been feathers its more so that the settlers wanting to farm and didn't want their livestock to have to compete with it. Added pressure from farm animals eating it's food, being flightless and having no fear of humans due to there being no natural predators.

The mature American Chestnut tree where the pigeons derived a lot of their food are all but extinct too.

I never knew of the stellars sea cow, and I'm usually interested in zoology and ecology. Learn something new every day.

Sucks that we eliminate the friendly ones. They could have been farmed but i guess thats a sucky fate too.

“Everything shall be discovered that has not yet been discovered, and when discovered, let us destroy it!” - Peter the Great, 1741

We are our own worst enemies.

@andrewcarson5850

2 ай бұрын

We're everyone's worst enemy.

@Shoelessjoe78

2 ай бұрын

I saw a show about a guy who lived in Siberia alone for something like a year. The part that stuck with me was when he said the most dangerous thing you can come across out there is another human.

@Nipplator99999999999

2 ай бұрын

No, from the perspective of all humanity, we are our own devoted lover, and terrorists for all other creatures whom dare to exist in a manner that we can exploit... Oppenheimer was only the next link in a world destroyer chain.

@terriwetz6077

2 ай бұрын

@@Nipplator99999999999 Yeah, I can agree to that. 😣

@Nipplator99999999999

2 ай бұрын

@@terriwetz6077 after reading that after post, I realize how much acceptance of it, hurt my soul. We will destroy anything to just have it easier for a negligible amount of time and effort.

I scuba dived next to sea cows in Belize, well, an island off the coast. Obviously a different variety but super cool creatures. One even gave me a head bump like my cat does, lol. Same day I itched the nose of a nurse shark. Fun day!

6:51 these are skulls of Stellar's Sea Lion, a pinniped and far from extinct. It is very easy to tell it's wrong because this is clearly the skull of a carnivore. Not Stellar's Sea Cow, which, as you mentioned, was an herbivore. Very different animals.

@aste4949

2 ай бұрын

Sirenian species' skulls are otherworldly, it's a shame to not show it, on top of being wrong.

@illustriouschin

2 ай бұрын

Too late, this is the new reality.

@griffinmckenzie7203

2 ай бұрын

Okay. And?

@alexhajnal107

2 ай бұрын

I thought those teeth looked sus.

One of my favorite modern extinctions is the Stephens Island wren or Lyall's wren which was first seen in April of 1892 and extinct by November of 1895 It went extinct so quickly, the Wikipedia article has a detailed description of the discovery and history of the bird by month!

The fastest extinction is when a single domestic cat caught every last specimen of Lyall's Wren. The cat's owner would study the birds his cat brought to him, but the few of these birds he received from his cat were actually the last ones.

@melvinshine9841

2 ай бұрын

That's a myth actually. The wren you're talking about was wiped out by a population explosion of feral cats on the islands that the bird inhabited. Either way, the bird was pretty much gone by the time it was officially described.

Man truly is a beast.

@jandrews6254

2 ай бұрын

Or perhaps, not as godlike as he thinks he is

@shanoukgaming6763

2 ай бұрын

It's probably more accurate to say Mankind is a virus. Check into Syncytin and Jumping genes.

Well, I sure hope if aliens ever come, they taste good. They wouldn't stand a chance then.

Sad stories.

Well, that was depressing. Informative and thought provoking, but still depressing.

The only reasons I had heard of Stellar’s Sea Cow prior to this were Wikipedia, alcohol, time to kill, and chronic depression (and weed). You start by reading about the history of Baltic Germans in the Russian Empire, next thing you know, you’re reading about an obscure Island in the North Pacific.

@barcelomielsa5368

2 ай бұрын

😂 One of the most relatable comments I've ever read.

I would absolutely love to have been there to see the flocks of passenger pigeon it was incredible sight, of which I'll never even fully fathom i'm sure. It would be something to see!

How many other species over the centuries that we will never learn about ?!?

Diseases from the Common Wood Pigeon played as much a role in the Passenger Pigeon decline as hunting pressure. Maybe more. Just as in humans European diseases devastated the Passenger Pigeon population because they had no immunity to foreign viruses and bacterial infection.

The DoDo lives on in my heart....

@kjaubrey4816

2 ай бұрын

Dodos of the world unite!

One of the best videos you’ve made

Considering the numbers beforehand, the extinction of the passenger pigeon is kinda impressive actually. Not a good thing but still impressive.

“Here’s a wonderful paradise, full of amazing creatures large and small. Take care of it as it is finite.” How i wish these words replaced “Be fruitful and multiply” in the opening chapter of a certain old book…

Another glorious chapter in human history.

I hope that one day we discover there are some of these animals left and they can recover.

@HappyBeezerStudios

2 ай бұрын

still waiting for someone to find the cave into the hollow earth or onto the mountain plateau where dinosaurs hang out /s

For humans, greed is good...but not for the other species

Thanks for sharing.

Very informative watch, Simon and crew. Quick correction note: Petoskey, Michigan is pronounced "Peht-ah-skee". Cheers. 👍

So long and thanks for all the fish!!!

I don't think there's a straight separating Europe and North America. In fact, I don't think Europe is anywhere near the Pacific Ocean...

@smooshiebear80

2 ай бұрын

I still don’t get why Europe and Asia are considered different continents when it’s all one big landmass.

Hearing how the herd gathered around the injured sea cow trying to protect them before also being killed is the saddest thing I've heard in a real hot minute 😭

In 500 years, we've wiped out so many creatures. I can't remember the animal anymore but that an explorer's cat decimated the only population on this undiscovered island

The loss of the passenger pigeon also changed the soil, by no longer being fertilized by their droppings.

Reminds me of that one Farside comic

It’s a good thing rabbits are so hearty and reproduce so quickly. Otherwise they’d likely also be extinct due to the delicious factor. It appears that one of the most notable ways to rank an animal’s chance of extinction is by its tastiness.

@hamsterama

2 ай бұрын

We are extremely lucky that whales did not go extinct. They are slow to reproduce, and were mercilessly hunted so that their fat could be processed into margarine.

I've been to the memorial demarking the place of Steller's death in Tyumen, Western Siberia while trying to return to european Russia. I'm a zoology/evolution geek and appreciated to have visited this place when visiting my dad who was working there for a german company.

Achievement Unlocked: Manifest Destiny.

we truly are horrifying beasts. We deserve no mercy

Pigeons are the closest living relative of the Dodo 😊

@Brainspoil

2 ай бұрын

Not the Carrier Pidgeons though.. we got them too. Who's next on the list?

@AdamKipling-vc1oh

2 ай бұрын

pidgeons😂

@aperson336

2 ай бұрын

@@Brainspoilbirds *loads shotgun*

@skylerbowerbank5847

2 ай бұрын

This explains soo much XD

@PaleoTheExaminer

2 ай бұрын

Well dodos are pigeons as this can be known from their neotenic properties. Aka dodos retain their juvenile characteristics into their adult lives. This explains why baby pigeons look suspiciously like dodos.

I like how Simon pronounced "Cherkov"

what's with the John Williams score?

Simon would 100% eat the last breeding pair of sea cows, prove me wrong 😂

Anyone ever hear the theory that the Stellar’s sea cow was made up and just an unflattering drawing of someone Stellar hated?

Never thought much of pigeons until later in life when my Dad started racing pigeons. It was actually very very interesting on the way they train them to return to their nests. But I also, remember how much it sucked to go out there and vaccinate the birds. I think the furthest Dad ever raced his birds was like 1500 miles. But he said in South America and Europe where it is still a lot more popular they have races that big and bigger. Sad to see this tiny fraction of the problems we've caused on this planet. Couldn't and don't want to imagine the total number of species have went extinct due to human ignorance.

@7:10 WOW

Dodos tasted awful and did not become extinct from being hunted for human consumption. They were also not dumb, despite not running away from humans and their animals. Rather, they were the biggest, baddest beasts on the island before humans showed up, and therefore had no natural enemies. What got them? They nested on the ground and their eggs got trampled by the pigs humans had brought with them.

Very sad .

Another sad tale is that of the original penguin, also known as great auk.

The passenger pigeon. A truly American tale. Nay. A truly capitalistic tale.

Steller’s sea cows are my Roman Empire

Is it just me, or is the audio not very crisp. Very high highs, and scratchy.

Simply sad!

Yeah but there's one animal that Stellar found that is not ever been seen again and people think is fake but it's in it's in the book with the cow

@MidnightBitesCarly

2 ай бұрын

Which animal is that??

Don't worry. We still got many murmurations of starlings to omnomnom nowadays

I heard that they are trying to bring back the Dodo, woolly mammoths and tasmanian tiger.

1:17 George looks more like a Georgina to me. (?)

Sea Cows too

Guaranteed Forrest Galante wants to go find one of these.... 😊👍

The best survival trait of any critter on this planet is to not be tasty. As we saw with Troy McClur's chart of the 'food chain' where every animal on the chart just pointed at humans. The Yangze River dolphin? Bzzzt. gone. Too tasty. The Tasmanian tiger? Gone. Not so much tasty itself, as it threatened tasty sheep . The only ones you can see today are on the label of Tasmanian Boag's beer.

Whoopsadoodle has become part of my everyday language. To the hilarity of the students. Hilarity at the word or me I'm not sure 😂

Looks like the northern version of the matinee

There are quite a few animals with only one example ever found. Theres a name for it.

💔

The Past was the worst and the Future always becomes the Past.

The most tragic extinction I've ever heard about occured on a small island of New Zealand. It was completly uninhabited until a lighthouse keeper moved there who brought a cat as company. It would start to bring the lighthouse keeper hunted specimen of the weird flightless thrushes living there. He couldn't identify the bird and sent an exemplar to the London Museum of Natural History to have an expert look at it. Things took a little back then and after months of waiting for an answer he received a reply: He had discovered a new species priviously unknown to science and endemic to his small lighthouse island - but meanwhile a single cat had managed to annihilate the complete population. This flightless thrush went extinct from the face of the earth before it even got realized to be an unknown species. _One cat was sufficient to kill off an entire species within month_ - and that's why you shouldn't allow your cat to roam freely.

@cggc9510

2 ай бұрын

This kind of thing happens all the time around the world. Off the coast of Tasmania, housecats were allowed to roam free. They were killing small penguins and seabirds on the island. Within a few years, the population of birds was nearly destroyed. So much pushback from cat owners because they fail to see their little fluffy as a stone cold killer. Eventually, the owners were held responsable and if their cat was caught outside the home, then it would be killed. Sucks, but you can't control the cat or keep it from killing.

@kai_plays_khomus

2 ай бұрын

@@cggc9510 I'm aware it's a daily occurance - I just aren't aware about any example which would illustrate it better because it's basically under laboratory conditions with one island, one endemic species, one cat and an accidental observer present to document the desaster. This happened and happens on hundreds of islands around New Zealand and the globe at large. I'm extremly critical of cats since I was a small child and witnessed the biological diversity from our garden area in the outskirts of Berlin collapsing and my grandfather's desperate fight to counter it when a male cat lady in the neighbourhood started to feed/take in all kinds of stray cats. When I was a kid you could see/hear several of the common bird species and the rarer ones on a regular basis. Then we had this group of cats procreating uncontrolled and the populations collapsed. My granddad would hang CDs into the trees to keep magpies away so they wouldn't put even more pressure on the smaller birds and their nests. He would install what amounted to spiked collars for trunks meant to keep the cats from reaching the nesting places - and we still caught cats literally on top of the nesting house above. In the end my grandpa didn't know how to help himself any longer and set up life traps to catch and delete them by hand, something which put me in some emotional turmoil as the animal friend I am because at the one hand I found it a cruel approach but at the other hand I had witnessed everything leading up to this point and that my grandfather had tried literally anything else. But in one regard my grandparents (I grew up in a family home with my grandparents, parents and sister) had contributed themselves by cleaning the garden more and more over the years, with less "messy corners" and replacing old domestic trees with imported exotic ones so although things looked more pleasing to the average elderly's eyes the food chain gets thinned out this way so a struggeling bird population was facing diminishing resources. This seems to be a pretty common problem with their generation: Although being animal friends they didn't have any idea about ecology - for them a tree was a tree and a hedge was a hedge, and if you wouldn't see birds in the imported tulip tree after the apple tree once standing there was teeming with bird life then it clearly had been the cats' fault when they may have been the main factor but surely not the only one.. I'm strictly opposed to letting cats roam freely, but not only for the birds' sake but the cats' as well, after all they not actually responsible for their natural behaviour. In fact it's animal torture to let your cat roam: Wild cats (Felis Sylvestris), the domestic cat'sdirect ancestor as they lived in our european woods until what little had been left of them got contaminated with their domesticated kin's DNA and rendered virtually extinct are strictly solitary outside the short mating season and require territories of hundreds of square miles/kilometres in the wild. This means that in settled areas the density of cats, apex predators after all is bizzarly high - and sets not only the local eco system but the cats themselves under extreme social pressure. People think it's totally normal that domestic cats are fighting and screaming, outright massacring each other - but it's not. These animals are under extreme social stress all the time and especially during the mating season when females have to constantly fight off interested males when in nature a female would have to deal with maybe two or three contenders from neighbouring territories and a few adolescent wannabees spawned the privious year. But it doesn't even end here! I wonder how many elderly ladies think their beloved cat didn't return because it got run over or stolen because they never bothered to look up relevant law - otherwise they would have known that any cat further than 300 metres (very roughly around 1000 feet) from the closest fenced off area can and will get shot by rangers to prevent them from pauching if caught in such a situation. so letting your cat roam in such areas basically amounts to providing target practice to the rangers. Berlin is a sort of a metropol island surrounded by a state of woods and rural villages as well as outskirts which you shouldn't picture as monotonous as US suburbs but more as a wreath of surrounding small towns demarking a gradient between these extremes, so the responsibilites of our rangers include settled areas where they are desperatly needed already to prevent the city getting taken over by wild boars which are as much of a pest here as racoons and oppossums are in the US). To get to the point: A population of for the most part non-feral and cared for cats living in the middle of a continent in an area surrounded by forests which should act as a diversity reservoir and activly regulated by hunting rangers is still more than sufficient to cause the collapse of even the most common local bird species' populations. Now let's escalate all contributing factors: Small populations of highly adapted birds endemic to a tiny island or a small archipelago so they might not even have a flight reflex due to the predators being absent priviously or having lost the ability to fly to begin with building their nests on the ground. Now you take this well balanced but very delicate ecosystem perhaps only a fraction of a single cat's natural territory and introduce a mating pair of a highly efficient and adaptable predator small enough to sustain itself sufficiently to spawn one or more filial generations (a bigger predator, let's say the leopard who behaviourally amounts to a domestic cat in all but size wouldn't find enough sustainance to make it, particularly not to the next generation) without any control or regulation completly reliant on its environmental resources - no f🖤king ecosystem could deal with something like that in the long term. However I lost track with this comment some time ago, sorry for the wall of text - because I'm neurodivergent I sometimes get carried away when I'm invested in something and this time I only realized when my reply exceeded youtube's letter limitation.. Believe me, *_this_*_ would have been a proper wall of text!_ 😅 I threw out all tangents and although still relating to the topic at hand there had been a lot of them and in the end I was typing about reactionaries weaponizing the expression "population reduction" to imply there was some great plan of the elites to kill off most of humanity most likely involving supposed vaccinations, the mob of woke satanists is happily admitting mass vaccination projects to serve population reduction after all.. 🤣

Rather than lament their extinction or the humans who were simplying hunting for their food as has always been our nature- Better to instead say thanks for their sacrifice. They were valuable stepping stones for our progress. Itadekimasu

This is too depressing to finish

@sunnyquinn3888

2 ай бұрын

That's what your mom said last night! 😁🤔 Wait-

Please do a video on the Carolina Parakeet aka snow parrot. A parrot species now extinct which was once native to the southern and eastern forests of the United States. Such a shame they’re gone. Another ecological disaster maybe one of the worst is the loss of the American chestnut tree.

Scientists have done there fair share. Just one example is new guinea and the importation of vegan piranhas.

I've always heard that the last passenger pigeon was named Matilda, and she died in the New Orleans zoo. In fact I've seen her stuffed body at the Audubon Museum in New Orleans. When she could have made her last stand in New Orleans, why in the world would she be in Cincinnati?

So be thankful for the food on your plate be it beef chicken or otherwise and finish it fully animals dont die to give us food then have it tossed out like a candy wrapper

😢

I extinguish every plate of chocolate chip cookies I come across. I wish I was better but I think I would probably eat all of anything delicious.

Notification Squad! :D

Its "pet-ahhh-skee"

We keep proving how bad humans are for all other life on Earth.

This early again? What's happening to me?

01:05 "Bering had already commanded a 1728 expedition which confirmed that Europe and North America were not connected by a land bridge. The straight separating the two continents still bears his name to this day." Didn't Bering confirm that there was not a land connection between Asia and North America and the Bering Straight between Russia and the US bears his name?

Wow Brain Blaze- Extinction Today I Found Out- Extinction. It's extinction day in the basement at Simon's.

The essayist Will Cuppy commented that the dodo seemed to have existed only to go extinct. He had no comment on the sea cow.

as a monument to another victim (the passenger pigeon) so aptly puts it: the species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man.

It sounded like you said, "He wrote a book called "The Bestest Sea Animals", he he...

Just so all the hungry people out there know ... i taste AWEFUL. and am rather tough, gristley, difficult to cook. And just as dangerous a prey animal as there is.

It is pronounced like "Miss-is-saga" Ontario.

What annoys me most is that none of them were domesticated and farmed despite being "so tasty"

😞

My sister in law will be charmed to learn she was named after the last passenger pigeon. 🤣

1/137

George and Martha

@TodayIFoundOut

2 ай бұрын

Martha?!?!? WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?!?!?! 😋 -Daven

Maybe the dodos wanted to go extinct.

@BrickNewton

2 ай бұрын

There's an episode of American Dad where Stan Jurassic Parks a Dodo and all it does is try to kill itself in different ways.

Anybody who can actually do something about this kind of stuff is too busy profiting from the destruction to give a shit about consequences until its way too late, just like with the environment

Dark dolphin 34