Recently, I went to Islamabad with my family. There we visited the Pakistan Museum of Natural History. Among others, the most interesting thing I found there was the largest and oldest model of the animal called, “Baluchitherium” or “the beast of Balochistan.”

It was unbelievably big in size, perhaps 19 to 20 feet tall. The interesting thing about this creature that I learnt was that it was found in our own Balochistan, in 1910, by English palaeontologist Sir Clive Forster Cooper.

As per the information written on a small introductory board, baluchitherium is one of the largest mammals on earth that became extinct some 30 million years back. It was like a big rhino with big ears and kind of a smiling face. It will give you a feel like it is welcoming you with a smile on the face.

There were many questions that came to my mind after meeting this beautiful creature. I was drowned in a flood of thoughts in my mind while coming back to Karachi.

Even my mum noticed my unusual silence and asked me several times, “What happened, boy? Why are you so quiet?”

My mind was occupied with the thoughts of baluchitherium, about what must have happened to this beautiful animal, why did it become extinct? There must be thousands of other animals which have now disappeared and what were the reasons for their extinction?

So I told my mum everything that was going on in my mind and she suggested that I should read books on extinct animals. Therefore, to find answers to these questions, I went to a bookshop and purchased many books about extinct and near-to-extinct animals and many other related history books.

The more I read, the more I was astonished. I found out that sabre tooth cat, woolly mammoth, dodo, west African black rhinos, Tasmanian tiger and many other animals used to roam the earth freely, but sadly they are no more, they have become extinct.

Among other reasons I found for their extinction, change in environment was on top of the list. Most of these animals belonged to the Ice Age. So as the earth got warmer, these animals started dying gradually.

Again, I wondered why couldn’t these animals change themselves with the change in environment? While reading these interesting books I found most of the initial research about these animals was done by the British in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.

In the mid-19th century, as we all know, many famous explorers, on their huge ships, set off from Europe to discover the world, mostly in search of the hidden treasures or finding a new country or continent.

During these sea voyages, many explorers and travellers found thousands of then unknown animals, which were later given names. Other than the living animals, they also found thousands of fossils. The travellers took many of these animals and fossils with them to their respective countries to show and do research.

Initially, they had two big challenges; first, to differentiate between the animals that look different, but belong to the same family, and the second challenge was finding the circumstances which led to the disappearance of animals from earth.

Almost all of us know Charles Darwin for his Theory of Evolution, but, trust me, his work was far more than we know. Most of the theories about animal species and their survival on earth were also introduced by him.

He never accepted the ‘Fix Species Theory’. Europeans during the 18th and 19th centuries had a belief that all the animals on earth are “fixed species” which means they were created when the earth was created. According to Fix Species Theory, there is no such thing as a “new species”.

As a naturalist, Charles Darwin never accepted the Fixed Species Theory. He questioned why there were so many different species of the same animals and why did millions of species disappear if that Fixed Species Theory is true?

He left England on a ship named HMS Beagle, from the coast of England in 1831. He travelled around the world till 1836. During these five years, he collected thousands of samples of animals and fossils.

During this journey, his ship once anchored at the coast of Argentina where he found the fossil of an animal similar to armadillo. This fossil was much larger than the normal size of the armadillos living on that island. Darwin discovered a few more fossils of the same huge animal. Those fossils proved that a large animal, very similar to armadillo, once lived there but it became extinct.

Darwin was curious why a fossil of a large-sized animal was very similar to the small-sized armadillo? Were the surviving armadillos the evolved copy of the extinct armadillo? Darwin took notes and fossils and continued his voyage.

In the fourth year of his voyage, Darwin landed near Galapagos Islands. Many species of big turtles lived on those islands. Here Darwin made a wonderful discovery. He found about 15 different turtle’s species there.

He noted that islands with enough food and water had turtles with smaller necks and larger round shells. This shape gave them safety while eating. While the islands with less water and grass had turtles with longer necks and flat shells because they had to grab food by lifting or extending their necks.

He also noticed different sparrows on different islands. Each island had a different species of the sparrow. For example, sparrows on dry islands had hard beaks, which they were using to break the shell and eat its pulp. But on the island with abundant insects, the sparrows had smaller and thin beaks. Likewise, the sparrows that had to take out food from holes in trees had longer beaks.

Darwin came to the conclusion that only those species could survive who adjusted with their environment. It’s like a small beak bird can’t survive in the garden with long funnel flowers, while a small neck turtle can’t live in gardenless plains. It will soon become extinct. It means nature itself selects the surviving species — only those species survive which have the ability to adjust because nature will give it the chance to do so.

Let’s understand it with another example. Only rabbits with long legs will survive in a meadow where many foxes live. Their long legs will help them dig and hide. In the same way, rabbits with shorter legs will survive in meadows without foxes. This means that nature selects the species and they evolve under its ecosystem.

During my research, I came across another English naturalist of the same era, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also had a similar opinion. During his eight years of voyage from Australia to Indonesia, he observed that only those butterflies survive whose colours were the same as the leaves.

British scholar Robert Malthus called it “Positive Check”, which means nature itself balances between humans and their resources. Only those animals and plants could survive who had the ability to use those limited resources.

Scientists are trying to bring some animals back to life. They are doing it by taking the DNA of that extinct animal from their fossils.

For instance, the Pyrenean ibex was the animal that became extinct in the year 2000, when a falling tree landed on the last surviving member of the species. However, scientists successfully managed to bring it to life but, unfortunately, it died due to a lung defect.

Scientists are putting all their efforts to bring these extinct animals back to this world, but will their efforts be fruitful? Will these animals survive in the present world where global warming is already a big issue? I know it’s a million-dollar question!

I was wondering that in the Jurassic World movie, they created an artificial environment for dinosaurs. Let’s hope scientists manage to create artificial enticement for those extinct animals.

Published in Dawn, Young World, March 4th, 2023