The Pyrenean Ibex
The only creature ever to go extinct twice.
- EXISTED
- Until 2000
- WHERE
- The Pyrenees, Spain
- LOST
- 6 January 2000
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Centuries of hunting; the last population dwindled to nothing
The bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex, was a wild mountain goat of the high Spanish Pyrenees, its great curved horns once a prize for hunters across Europe. By the close of the twentieth century it had been reduced to a single ageing female named Celia, fitted with a radio collar so scientists could watch over the last of her kind. In January 2000 she was found crushed beneath a fallen tree.
Her story did not quite end there, and that is the cruelty of it. Cells taken before her death were used, in 2003, to clone her; a kid was born, the first creature ever brought back from extinction, but its lungs were malformed, and it lived only a few minutes. And so the Pyrenean ibex holds a distinction no other animal can claim: it has died out not once but twice, the second time in the space of a single breath.
Celia, the last Pyrenean ibex, was found dead beneath a fallen tree on 6 January 2000. In 2003 a clone made from her cells was born alive, and died of a lung defect within minutes, making the bucardo the only animal to go extinct, twice.