Living on the Edge

Last semester, I took a class called the Lab. I made a book called Living on the Edge  and buttons of the animals. The book is about recently extinct animals around the world. "Recently" is referring to the past 200 yrs.  There are many animals are dead or dying as we speak that people never knew about. Here are a few images from my book and the buttons that I sold.

 The Quagga is a subspecies of Zebra that died out. people are still trying bring them back through selective breeding. It is called the Quagga Project.

 The Great Auk was probably my favorite animal in the book. It is not related to the penguin. This was an example of "Evolutionary Convergence", which is when two non-related animals fill the same role of the ecosystem in two different parts of the world. Auks were from the North hemisphere and Penguins are from the Southern hemisphere.

The Carolina Parakeet is what inspired me to wright and illustrate this book. At the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in DC, I was able to handle a dead specimen of North America's only native parrot. I had no idea we ever had a parrot. They were deliberately killed off in  1929 because they were considered "pests".