It is not often that we can pinpoint the exact spot where a species went extinct, but Shallow Bay on the remote north coast of West Falkland is such a place. There, in 1876, a very peculiar animal - the last of its kind -was mercilessly slain. Chances are it was quick. The creatures were known to be unafraid and easy to kill. And so, as Charles Darwin himself had predicted, the Falkland Islands wolf went the way of the dodo. It hadn't taken long. Halfa century earlier, the islands were largely uninhabited and the wolf was abundant. Then people began to arrive - shepherds from Scotland and gauchos from Argentina. They did not take kindly to having a voracious predator in their midst. When fur trappers arrived from America, it was only a matter of time. In 1914, taxonomist Oldfield Thomas of the Natural History Museum in London dealt the wolf a final, posthumous insult by naming it Dusicyon australis: foolish dog of the south.
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