Whistling Past the Graveyard

Happy Halloween!  Across the country, our zoos and aquariums have been decked out for the season for the past month or so, all the better to take advantage of special events.  A lot of the décor would be pretty familiar to anyone who has decorated for Halloween, which much of it more themed around fall than the spooky season itself.  There are pumpkins (not just those that get carved or smashed up for treats) and haybales and scarecrows and dried corn.  

For spookier decorations, there are those fake skeletal animals which drive many a keeper to fury with their anatomical inaccuracies (spider's don't have bones!).  And then there are the graveyards.

Graveyards are a popular lawn ornament for Halloween at many homes, but those at the zoo tend to be a little different.  The names inscribed on their Styrofoam surfaces aren't Barry M. Deep, I. M. Agoner or other silly puns.  Here, the festivities get a little grim.

Passenger Pigeon.  Sept. 1, 1914

Carolina Parakeet.  Feb 21, 1918

Thylacine/"Tasmanian Tiger." Sept 7, 1936

And many others.  All extinct animals - but no dinosaurs or pterodactyls, or even mammoths and sabre-toothed cats.  The markers all commemorate recently extinct animals - ones driven to the grave by our collective, human hand.  Some species we know exactly when they disappeared.  Others just sort of... faded away, and then someone realized it had been a really long time until anyone had seen one.

Read about the Extinct Species Graveyard at the Bronx Zoo here

These tombstones are often treated as a bit of a joke, a cutesy prop, but if you think about it, they contain an existential terror.  In almost every horror movie, their is a survivor - who else would tell the story if there wasn't?  But extinction, by its definition, leaves no survivors.  You take the death of an individual - be it at the wrong end of a sailor's club, at the claws of an introduced predator, or of old age, isolated from potential mates by habitat loss and therefore dying alone - and then you multiply it on a grand scale, until no one is left.  There are some horror movies that focus on the extinction (or near extinction) of the human species, such as I Am Legend.  It's easy to extrapolate that terror to animals.

Anyway, enjoy the candy.