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They are all that are left. Tired feathers and forgotten skins relegated to museum bins. Reminders of what once was but can never be again. Testament to the awful truth that a living species, once extinct, will never return. Ghosts! But there is more to these aging specimens than skin and bones. Seen through the lens of photographer Rosamond Purcell, the remains undergo a kind of resurrection. All are specimens from a Dutch museum. All were originally collected from habitats on islands where the arrival of people can change nature's balance almost overnight. "All are obviously dead," Purcell says of her ghosts, "but how these dead can dance!"

Bonin Islands - Grosbeak

In the 1820s, these 8-inch finches found on Peel Island south of Japan fed on fruits and buds in the forests of their volcanic home. Then came an army of new residents: cats, rats, goats and dogs brought by whalers and other settlers. The vulnerable birds probably fed on the ground, and the rats in particular gobbled bird eggs and young. The last grosbeak was seen in 1828.

Although small, this broad-billed bird from the American territory of Guam in the western Pacific Ocean was both territorial and aggressive. But that feistiness wasn't enough to save it from the brown tree snake, an alien intruder that probably arrived on a military plane or ship after World War II, then preyed on Guam birds. About 460 still remained in 1981. Just two years later, not one was found.

Delalande's Coucal

A ground-dwelling cuckoo, Delalande's coucal lived in Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, along with an array of strange animals found there. One of them was the elephant bird, an avian behemoth whose bones dwarf the coucal in this photograph. Malagasy people hunted the coucal for its feathers. Europeans destroyed forests and brought in cats and rats. The last coucal specimen was collected in 1834.

Spectacled Cormorant

"They weighed 12-14 pounds, so that one single bird was sufficient for three starving men," wrote the explorer Georg Steller, who discovered the species-and sampled its flesh-while shipwrecked on a small Aleutian island in the North Pacific. The cormorant was plump, clumsy, virtually flightless and easy for people to catch. It disappeared around 1850, about a century after Steller discovered it, eaten into extinction by hungry people.

# posted by Medical Information : 3:31 AM