At the start of 2020 a strange, beautiful creature, whose kind had been around for at least 200 million years, was declared gone forever. By comparison, we homo sapiens have spent a mere 300,000 years on the planet. The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.
The Chinese paddlefish could grow to an impressive seven metres in length, with a long snout used to sense the electrical activity of its prey, tiny comical eyes and a huge flapping mouth. Its premature demise was not a natural occurrence; it had been severely overfished – during the 1970s, 25 tons of paddlefish were being netted each year – and the damming of its Yangtze river habitat blocked the route to its spawning grounds. By the time efforts were made to save it, it was too late. The last sighting of a Chinese paddlefish was in 2003, and it probably became extinct years before the formal announcement.1
