About the atlas

Purpose

The Atlas of Historically Lost Species is a public resource and work in progress created by Benjamin Breen, a historian at UC Santa Cruz. It supports research for a future book about species extinctions before 1900: how people first documented these organisms in writing, and how their disappearance came to be scientifically understood.

Scope

The project begins with species reported in writing while they still existed, or close to their disappearance. It focuses on extinctions associated with human activity during recorded historical time. Fossil-only cases and species lost before any surviving written account are outside this starting corpus.

Historical names do not always map neatly to modern species. Each dossier will keep a claim’s wording, date, place, and attribution visible so readers can follow how identifications and extinction dates were established.

Work in progress

The atlas aims to find, aggregate, transcribe, and translate all available historical primary sources for each case. It also records the places named in those texts, surviving images and specimens, and scholarship that interprets the evidence.

Silphium of Cyrenaica and the great auk are the first two dossiers. The Authorities index connects their primary passages to the people and textual traditions that preserve them. The other entries currently shown in the index are starting points for further research.