Talk:List of New Zealand species extinct in the Holocene

Blue-billed Duck removed from list
I've removed the Blue-billed Duck from the list. Horn listed shoveler (Anas rhynchotis) and blue-billed duck (Oxyura australis). Specimens attributed to the latter are all now considered to be other taxa but mainly scaup (Holdaway et al. 2000). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species lists the Blue-billed Duck as Near Threatened (NT) and BirdLife International does the same! Pmaas 16:19, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Similar Page
A lot of this information is on List of New Zealand birds. I wonder whether these pages could be combined. It is not good practise to have the same information in more than one place - maintenance issues, etc. It seems the only other animals are the bats, so shouldn't take too much work. What does the panel think? GrahamBould 13:35, 12 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Besides mammals (bats), this article also covers NZ reptiles, amphibians, fish and insects. Are these covered elsewhere?
 * While I agree some of the bird information is duplicated (on New Zealand birds as well as List of New Zealand birds), this article has a unique focus on extinctions. The other articles state or imply that they only cover birds that lived to see human settlement, which seems like a reasonable choice for those broader articles. But it also means that they can't be as comprehensive as this one. For instance, there are 14 prehistoric penguins listed here that aren't on the other lists. This is also the only one of these articles that distinguishes between prehistoric extinctions, post-Polynesian extinctions and post-European extinctions. I wouldn't want to see that information lost. -- Avenue 00:37, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Indeed some of the birds can be found elsewhere, but as said by Avenue, this list is on extinction, not only birds. Also many other animals (not only bats), like reptiles, insects, etc. And there are also lists like this for other regions and countries. So I would not combine this article with List of New Zealand birds. This article shows only the extinct animals. More info is of course always welcome. Pmaas 13:31, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Pre-Holocene extinctions
Why shouldn't we list these in this article? We did until they were removed just now. Is it because we divide up the bird extinctions according to human settlement dates?-118.93.188.73 (talk) 18:43, 24 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I think we should include them. We still do for birds - most of the listed extinctions from before human settlement are pre-Holocene. Fivemack's edit summary for the first removal said "The article clearly doesn't intend to list creatures that went extinct before the Holocene", but the opposite seems clear to me. The lead sentence defines the list's scope as being "extinct New Zealand animals", which includes pre-Holocene extinctions. While we could change the list's scope, it would be good to discuss it here first. -- Avenue (talk) 09:58, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Holocene Extinctions
To make this list more similar to the other extinct animal lists I will be removing extinct animals not did not go extinct during the Holocene Epoch. Extinctanimals22 (talk) 01:39, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The discussion above appeared to conclude that having extinctions from earlier periods was desirable in this article. For the time being, I have added the two mammals extinct in earlier eras to the "See also" list, but I would suppport restoring them to the main body of the article.- gadfium 20:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I now see that there was an extensive list of birds and a smaller list of marine reptiles which were extinct before the Holocene. There are too many to add to the "See also" section. I think they should be restored, and if an article only on Holocene extinctions is considered desirable, a separate article such as Holocene extinctions in New Zealand should be considered.- gadfium 20:51, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

The extinction date for the created moa seems wrong. In the table it says 1850s, but in the linked Wikipedia page it implies that it was earlier. I am not an expert by any means, but I would be surprised to discover that there was a species of moa still living when the Europeans arrived. Craq (talk) 02:32, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

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External links modified
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Another Holocene discussion
Just wanting to re-open the discussion from several years ago above about whether to include pre-Holocene extinctions. Personally, I think that changing this article to "List of extinct animals of New Zealand" would make more sense, and would be fitting with most of the other national extinct animal list pages (eg. List of extinct animals of Australia, List of extinct animals of India). The only ones which I've been able to find that are explicitly linked to the holocene are on continental levels (eg. List of African animals extinct in the Holocene, List of North American animals extinct in the Holocene), which I don't think fits in this context. Turnagra (talk) 21:24, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
 * The list of Australian animals features only those animals that went extinct in the late Holocene or modern times, and the list of Indian animals is just a stub. Would there be enough non/pre-Holocene extinct animals from New Zealand to justify a different list?--Mr Fink (talk) 22:30, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Admittedly I didn't check the article first to make sure it was a decent example (I'd seen the Australian one before, but not the Indian one) - but with that said, there are plenty of other examples for the Netherlands, the British Isles, the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines, though this last one isn't the best example and includes extant species which have become locally extinct. The inclusion criteria on most of these lists is pretty vague, and generally seems to focus on the Quaternary more than the Holocene specifically. Though, with that said, some of them go so far as to include most of the Cenozoic. There are definitely more inclusions which could be made in either instance, moreso in the latter but we could work with either option. Turnagra (talk) 23:04, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

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