Here are 10 iconic species no longer on Earth, largely thanks to humans.

1. Passenger pigeon

A nomadic bird that could reach speeds in excess of 60mph, the passenger pigeon was once a common sight across North America, from the Great Plains to the Atlantic Coast. At one point they numbered up to five billion, making them the most populous species of bird on the planet.

That was until the arrival of Europeans, who hunted them on an industrial scale for cheap meat. Tens of millions were slaughtered each year and the last wild passenger pigeon was seen in 1901. Cincinnati Zoo was home to the last captive bird, Martha, which died in 1914 - it is now stuffed and found inside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

“Passenger Pigeons once migrated through Canada, the United States, and the Gulf of Mexico in numbers so huge that they darkened the sky,” says the website of the American Natural History Museum. “One flock was described as ‘a column, eight or ten miles in length... resembling the windings of a vast and majestic river.’ In 1808, [another] flock of passenger pigeons in Kentucky was estimated at more than two billion birds.” John James Audubon, a French-American naturalist, described how a migrating flock passing over his head blocked the sun for three straight days.