Many poems exist about animals and plants. We should get used to reading poetry about extinct species because we are just in the middle of a mass extinction, this time one not caused by a meteorite impact or an episode of hyper- vulcanism but by ourselves and our hyper greedy civilization. Many of the animals you can read about in poems, like tigers, lions or elephants, might soon be gone forever. Many animals that still existed when I was a child, like the Chinese river dolphin (the Baiji) or the Golden Toad of Costa Rica, are gone forever. Birds, fish, insects, trees, herbs and other plants, spiders, fungi, microorganisms are going the same way, every day.

So get used to reading poems about extinct animals. The Baiji only disappeared recently and I don’t see myself able to write a poem about this sad event already, so to start the genre, I am giving you here instead a small poem about an animal that went extinct before our times, long ago, a pterosaur, a class of flying animals that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. I don’t know if anybody has ever tried to write a Haiku about a pterosaur, but there must always be a first time:

Gliding gracefully

Pteranodon longiceps

Leaves an empty sky

The pictures are from

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pteranodon_longiceps_mmartyniuk_wiki.png?uselang=de

and

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SI-Sky.JPG

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur.