The Eastern Puma has been officially declared extinct. The majestic large cats historically roamed every state of the US east of the Mississippi River. But in the latest devastating news from the animal kingdom, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the animals extinct on Sunday, removing the Eastern puma from the list of endangered species for the last time. The Eastern puma’s plight has been ongoing for over a century, and by 1900 they had all but vanished due to systematic hunting and trapping. In fact, Mark Elbroch, the lead scientist for the puma program at the big cats conservation group Panthera, said the cats have been ‘long extinct’. The the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opened an extensive review into the status of the eastern cougar back in 2011. The forests and coastal marsh predators were only declared endangered in 1973, even though no sightings of the wild cats had been documented for three decades.

The last of their kind on record was killed by a hunter in Maine in 1938…