Plus, I am afraid I have bad news… After more than 20 million years on the planet, the Yangtze river dolphin was officially declared extinct in August 2007, the first species of cetacean (whale, dolphin or porpoise) to be driven from this planet by human activity.

An intensive six-week search by an international team of marine biologists involving two boats that ploughed up and down the world’s busiest river failed to find a single specimen. The idea was to catch any that were remaining andd try to begin a captive breeding project so that in future years they could be reintroduced.

To blame for its demise is the increasing number of container ships that use the Yangtze, as well as the fishermen whose nets became an inadvertent hazard.

This is no ordinary extinction of the kind that occurs frequently in a world of millions of still-evolving species. The Yangtze freshwater dolphin was a remarkable creature that separated from all other species so many millions of years ago, and had become so distinct, that it qualified as a mammal family in its own right. It is the first large vertebrate to have become extinct for 50 years and only the fourth entire mammal family to disappear since the time of Columbus, when Europeans began their colonisation of the world.

Sorry to bear the bad news….

Robert