Extinct in the Future

"What? No Big Belly Burger? It's one of the few perks of living in this time. We're out of cows where I come from."

— Eobard Thawne, The Flash (2014)

A common detail used to characterize a futuristic or merely crapsack Earth is that a recognizable and/or ubiquitous species in real life is either extinct or critically endangered as a result of disease, pollution, habitat loss, phlebotinum, a past disaster, or just good old human interference. This could be meant as a Green Aesop, to serve as a reminder that Humans Are Bastards, or to easily demonstrate that this world is in bad shape and/or that it is different from our own. Futuristic alternatives to replicate the lost species and/or their ecosystem functions (e.g. cloning, genetic engineering, Time Travel, robotic replacements) may come into play as well.

Whales and other sea life are common victims, as they are quite vulnerable to habitat change, pollution, exploitation, and other forces that can drive species to extinction. This is also often used with so-called "charismatic species"^note like tigers and pandas, since these are famous endangered species that are familiar to the general public.

A Sub-Trope of Gaia's Lament, and could lead to Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap, where natural products are more valuable than synthetic products in a hypothetical future, because circumstances have made natural sources difficult to obtain (they may or may not have gone extinct).

Contrast Not So Extinct, where species thought to be extinct show up again. Compare Humanity's Wake for when humans go extinct and Removed Species Calamity for when a species extinction or reduction in number causes problems to the ecosystem.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

Neon Genesis Evangelion:
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Thousands of plant and animal species were wiped out by Second Impact, which also rendered the oceans completely barren of life. Shinji's reaction to meeting Pen-Pen hints it's the first time he's seen a penguin.
- In Rebuild 2.0 the children visit a marine life preserve and can't identify creatures like turtles that they see there. While it's ostensibly a project to restore the oceans, the extensive decontamination procedure they go through just to enter implies that Pre-Second Impact marine life can only remain alive inside a tank.

Comic Books

In the DC One Million 80-Page Giant, white footed mice couldn't adapt to cities being moved into tesseracts. The last one was genetically engineered to give him the ability to split himself into an infinite number of copies.
First Knife is set in a distant future (the 33rd Century to be exact) where an event called the Anthropocene Thermal Maximum killed off a lot of animals. Many of the remaining animals (such as cows and horses) were purged into oblivion by the Devas.
Judge Dredd: Many species are long extinct due to the post-apocalyptic state of the world. One story dealt with the death of the last whale.
In Legion of Super-Heroes/Bugs Bunny Special, Sun Boy mentions that rabbits are extinct on Earth in the 31st century.
The Metabarons Universe:
- Horses are extinct in The Metabarons but the emperor has one created through genetic engineering.
- In The Incal, Deepo impresses Rsimo by using his power to create a rose which was extinct for generations.
After Regular Show ended its run, there was a six-issue miniseries taking place after the series' conclusion titled Regular Show: 25 Years Later. At one point, Mordecai and Rigby's aged wives Stef and Eileen ask if they brought any milk. Their husbands explain that they didn't because cows have gone extinct.
Starslayer is about a man transported to the future where Earth is a radioactive wasteland. The limited series ends with Tamara asking Torin to tell her about trees, flowers and birds.
Y: The Last Man: A year and a half after the plague that wipes out all but two male mammals, embryos, and even sperm, Dr. Allison Mann has a realization that, due to their short lifespans, Pygmy Shrews have gone most likely extinct. Opossums and rats won't be far behind. Rats are seen long after they should have gone extinct, though, suggesting that life found a way to continue after all.

Fan Works

Nier: Automata (RE)Birth:
- The aliens intentionally hunted down all felines (both domesticated and their wild relatives) because humans loved them. The tigers are the only survivors thanks to being too stealthy and dangerous to be worth the effort.
- Discussed with whales and other marine organisms. While Pascal has hope that some whales survive in the deep depths of the ocean, Blue believes that they have gone extinct from either environmental disasters or the alien invasion.
- In a subversion of a canon example, A2's discovery of baby Alexander and eventually YoRHa using DNA from both him and the moon storage system to clone more humans undoes the twist of NieR: Automata that humanity has become extinct thanks to the events of the previous game.
In Rocketship Voyager, this is implied to be the result of factory-farms using every scrap of arable land to grow food to cope with an Overpopulation Crisis.
- A Space Marine gives the "Come on, you apes!" line, then has to explain what an ape is. "An extinct animal — like you will be if you don't watch your six!"
- Voyager's vid library includes documentaries on long-vanished species like African lions.
- Chakotay has an eagle feather in his medicine bundle, a memento of a failed attempt while he was a teenager to set free the last bald eagle on Earth from its aviary.

Film — Animation

In the Ice Age short film No Time For Nuts, after Scrat is hurled through time thanks to a small time machine, he ends up in the distant future in front of what appears to be an enormous Oak Tree. However, it turns out just to be a memorial, complete with a plaque that reads "Here Stood the Last Oak Tree."

Film — Live-Action

1985: The bald eagle, brown pelican, osprey, and herring gull are all said to have been driven to extinction by the titular year from consuming DDT-poisoned fish.
Ken Gilmore: As early as 1969, the FDA seized tons of coho salmon because their DDT content made them unfit for food. But the birds didn't know that. The bald eagle and the brown pelican, the osprey in Rhode Island, and the herring gull in Lake Michigan ate the fish and were wiped out.
The Age of Stupid: By around 2042, half of all species on planet Earth have gone extinct thanks to Global Warming, with one of them being the Indonesian Tree.
Avatar: While not shown in theaters, the script and an extended cut for the opening show life on Earth. All whales and nearly half of all fish species have been wiped out and the last lion living outside of captivity has died in Kenya. However, the Bengal tiger was successfully rescued from extinction via cloning.
Babylon A.D.: Aurora is saddened to learn from Toorop that tigers have gone extinct in the wild when she observes a tiger pen next to a Russian train station. He explains that they're not "real" tigers, but second-generation clones: copies of copies.
Blade Runner: All animal species are either extinct or so rare that to own a real one, instead of a replicant version, is lavish expense. Even the daughter of a fantastically wealthy business magnate says that "of course" her pet owl isn't real.
Blade Runner 2049 indicates that every non-human species has gone extinct on Earth — or at least, anything bigger than a few insects. The protagonist runs into a single stray dog in the desolate wilderness, but its owner isn't even sure it it's artificial or not.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes: Cats and dogs went extinct thanks to a mysterious disease, leaving apes to become the pets and servants of mankind.
Cthulhu: The characters observe polar bears at the zoo, but a radio report implies that all wild polar bears have died out. Given what happens at the end of the movie, humanity may well end up in a similar situation.
The Bad Future featured in Elmo Saves Christmas involves a downplayed example with Christmas trees. According to Grover, Christmas trees have become an endangered species after a whole year of non-stop Christmas — although he then states that they are all gone, as if they are extinct, which presumedly means the Christmas trees are functionally extinct.
Everything Everywhere All at Once features an Extinct in a Futuristic Alternate Universe variant. Alpha Waymond is overjoyed to taste cream cheese and half-and-half milk in "our" Evelyn's universe because cows were wiped out in his world during the war against Jobu Tupaki.
In Logan, taking place in 2029, a villain remarks that the claw marks on Logan's victims look like they were done by a tiger or by Freddy Krueger, except the former is extinct and the latter is fictional.
My Old Ass: Salmon, according to Older Elliot, who says Younger Elliot should enjoy them while they last.
Odd Squad: World Turned Odd: It's all but stated that Odd Todd managed to wipe out every single fish species on the planet in the Bad Future, replacing them with plastic singing ones. O'Donahue, being a fisherman that catches inedible fish, is forced to feed Oona, Otis, and Olympia beans instead.
Quintet is set in a future where Earth is in a permanent ice age, and all life, including humans, is slowly dying out. Even seals and presumably other cold-adapted animals are now extinct, as the cold was too much for even them to survive.
In the British scifi thriller Settlers (2021), nine-year-old Remmy (who grew up on their settlement on Mars) asks her parents (who are from Earth) if they've ever seen a whale, or an owl or an elephant. They admit the only animal they've seen are dogs, and go on to explain to their daughter that Earth is now a Crapsack World, implying this trope.
A Sound of Thunder: The reason given for time travel being used to hunt dinosaurs is that, get this, all animal species are extinct by 2055. This is mentioned in only one scene and is never referenced again. It also raises many more questions than it solves. Also, apparently, no one bothered to preserve the DNA of animals before they went extinct. The protagonist has to use a self-made scanner to obtain DNA readings on animals in the past, in order to see if they can be cloned (he somehow gets readings on a lion despite the machine set to go to a time before lions even existed).
Played for Drama in Soylent Green. By 2022, the environmental situation has gotten so bad that the entire ocean's plankton population, which the Soylent made its foodstuffs from, is dead. They're making food out of corpses because the situation is that desperate.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: While Star Trek's Earth is generally positive, humpback whales went extinct sometime in the 21st century. Which becomes a problem for Earth when an alien probe arrives wanting to talk to them.
In the Crapsack World Terminal City Ricochet is set in, birds are nearly extinct. The mere sighting of a starling outside of town is a newsworthy event, and the trees outside Glimore's vacation home in the woods are fitted with speakers that play recordings of birds.
In Interstellar, the world is facing a severe blight that's wiped out all crops except corn and caused a Second Dust Bowl. It eventually reaches the point that it starts to threaten all land plants, and the oxygen they produce, potentially rendering all complex life on Earth extinct.

Literature

The premise of "2430 A.D." takes species extinction up a notch, as the last zoo on Earth is shut down. This leaves humanity as the sole animal species on Earth, with the only other life forms being the plankton used for food.
After Man: A Zoology of the Future covers the world in Humanity's Wake, but before they went extinct they managed to cause the extinction of many familiar species. A tree of life in the back of the book (mostly covering mammals) shows that cetaceans went extinct during the Age of Man, and elephants, perissodactyls (horses and rhinos), and tuataras shortly afterwards. Monotremes and pinnipeds go extinct between 10 and 20 million years in the future. Additionally, canines, bears, and big cats (and indeed all non-mustelid carnivorans except one felid, which evolves into the arboreal, monkey-like Striger) are extinct by 50 million years in the future.
A Bad Future variation appears in the Animorphs novel The Message. Ax reveals that all species of life on Earth will be wiped out by the Yeerks, except for those required to feed their human hosts, if they succeed in taking over Earth. Fortunately, the Animorphs manage to stop the Yeerk invasion before it succeeds at the end of the series.
In Breakfast of Champions, Kilgore Trout, whose earlier stories were published in pornographic magazines with covers luridly advertising "wide-open beavers", mentions in a Flash Forward to 1979 that he "mourned especially when the last beaver died".
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: In the aftermath of World War Terminus, many species are completely extinct, like frogs. Even the animals still alive, like sheep and goats, are rare enough that owning one is a major status symbol.
In the 30th century depicted in the Doctor Who New Adventures novel So Vile a Sin, many iconic animal species are extinct. Specific mention is made of a project to resurrect the African elephant through genetic engineering.
The Dream Eaters and Other Stories: "Sharazad" is set in a future Africa where humans are extinct and social carnivores have developed intelligence and bipedalism.
The introduction to Expedition notes that pretty much all megafauna is at the brink of extinction, claiming that, barring humans, nothing larger than the Norway rat exists outside of zoos, and even the animals in zoos are badly mutated.
The Familias Regnant novel "Hunting Party" revolves around a futuristic country house party featuring a fox hunt as one of the entertainments. It's mentioned that real foxes went extinct long ago, so the foxes they're hunting were genetically engineered by mixing genes from several similar species.
Connie Willis's "Fire Watch" about time-traveling historians (including Doomsday Book, Blackout, and To Say Nothing of the Dog) feature this. Cats have been wiped out by a plague by the 2050s, and characters time travelling back to World War II are fascinated when they encounter them. In the end of To Say Nothing of the Dog, some are brought back via Time Travel.
Future Evolution has a segment (available here) where a time traveler goes to the year 3000, where he finds that all megafauna, and indeed most non-domestic or scavenger animals, have gone extinct. There are no songbirds and no seafood, implying their extinction as well, and coral reefs are all but nonexistent.
Generation A has bees (seemingly) going extinct, resulting in mass extinction of many plant species (with others kept alive through hand pollination).
In Larry Niven's Hanville Svetz short stories, the title character is sent back in time to obtain specimens of creatures that no longer exist in the future, such as horses and Gila monsters ("Get a Horse!"/"The Flight of the Horse"), sperm whales ("Leviathan!") and wolves ("There's a Wolf in My Time Machine").
Harda Horda anthology gives two different examples:
- In Rail Station Attendant, thanks to man-made climate change, overfishing, but also the economic collapse that made shipping food globally impossible, a great deal of animal species — including the majority of farm animals and fish species that normally can be easily bred on fish farms — are gone, to highlight just how bad things went within Michiko's life.
- In Fiery Tail, Earth was hit by the titular asteroids, killing most of life in the impact event and then the resulting ice age wiped out whatever survived that and wasn't close to the equator. Mammalian life is effectively gone short for rodents, and humans are presumed extinct (or at least below the level that would leave any traces for satellites to pick). The small handful of species that took over and evolved from there are part of the Settling the Frontier feeling, since the human survivors that weathered it all in a space ark are technically on Earth, but it might as well be an alien world due to the various differences.
In The History of Bees, bees have been obliterated in 2098. As a result, humans are now pollinating crops by hand.
Household Gods: Played with. Nicole attends a circus game in which a hungry wolf pack is let loose on an aurochs. She sees the fact that the aurochs is a extinct species in her own time as an additional horror.
"In the Barn", a short story by Piers Anthony, is set in a world where a plague caused the extinction of all non-human mammals, leading to society creating People Farms for milk production.
Lumbanico, the Cubic Planet: Many animal species of animals (like horses) and plants (like strawberry trees, or cork and holm oaks) became extinct in Lumbanico due to an environmental disaster known as the Black Cloud seven centuries ago.
Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future: By 2490, most large animals are extinct, with the only notable animals being smaller creatures like insects, spiders, lizards, snakes, ducks, and rats. This is the reason why genetically-engineered offshoots of humanity are created and introduced to repopulate the empty niches.
Mortal Engines: Blue whales are mentioned to have been extinct for thousands of years in the first chapter, presumably as a result of most of the world's oceans drying up or moving elsewhere during the Sixty Minute War.
Oryx and Crake: The titular species, along with many others such as polar bears, are extinct.
In Pocket Monsters: The Animation, it's stated that this is the reason why real-life animals aside from humans usually don't appear in the Pokémon universe. Most are extinct or near-extinction. An early draft of the third movie would have explored this further by having a plot revolving around a revived dinosaur fossil.
In the 24th century of Post-Self, many species have gone extinct in the physical world, such as fennec foxes, though the 200-year-old uploaded furry Dear still depicts itself as an anthropomorphized fennec.
In the Sprawl Trilogy, horses are extinct from an equine plague, and even attempts to revive them via cloning have failed.
The Time Machine: In the tropical world of 802,701 AD, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, pest animals and plants, predators, most insects, fungi, and diseases have all gone extinct. The Time Traveler considers the eradication of the latter groups to be a positive achievement for humanity's engineering of the environment, rather than the ecological disaster it would be.
Manifold: Time. There's an offhand mention of a children's poster showing the last rhinos in their dome in Zambia.
Discussed and ultimately subverted in True Grit. Rooster Cogburn is sure that buffaloes are going to go extinct and he won't get to eat them anymore. Fast forward to the Distant Finale and they are still around, but he isn't.
In the Uplift series, chimpanzees and dolphins are being uplifted by humanity, but orangutans and a number of whale species are extinct, a fact that humans try not to mention around highly conservationist aliens.
The War Against the Chtorr. Earth is subject to Hostile Terraforming by the more advanced and voracious Chtorran ecology, against which native flora and fauna can't compete. While the emphasis is on the effects on humanity that's being wiped out or worse, transformed, we get occasional references to this trope. When McCarthy asks his therapist how he's supposed to mourn the death of an entire world, he's told to do so a piece at a time, and the therapist lists various animals that no longer exist. On another occasion McCarthy is in an aircraft flying over the giant Enterprise Fish and ponders the death of the whales that have been driven into extinction to fuel the fish's voracious growth (though a later short story shows the whales have also been transformed).
In The Wolf Chronicles' Distant Finale epilogue, it is mentioned that the ice caps have melted and polar bears have gone extinct.
World War Z: The ecosystem was badly damaged during the war, and marine species were subject to exploitation. All species of sub-arctic baleen whales were wiped out before the end of the war. Additionally, slow-moving land species like turtles are now a rare sight.

Live-Action TV

According to Rafael, zebras and lions no longer exist in the future in which 3% is set.
One episode of Andromeda mentions that the common house cat has been extinct for thousands of years.
Black Mirror: By the time of the episode "Hated in the Nation", most of the bees have been wiped out by a colony collapse disorder, forcing humanity to rely on robotic replacements called Automated Drone Insects to do the bees' ecosystem services (the plot is about someone hacking these ADIs, to great consequence). A news broadcast also reveals that the Siberian crane (critically endangered at the time of the episode's release) was just declared extinct.
Cowboy Bebop (2021): When Spike and Jet first lay eyes on Ein, they stare at the Welsh corgi in fascination because dogs are incredibly rare, as only the rich could afford to bring their pets with them during the Homeworld Evacuation.
By the time Endlings takes place (2040), lions and rhinos are already extinct, and there is only one elephant left alive.
The Flash (2014):
- Eobard Thawne comes from a future where cows are extinct, which has led him to have a hamburger obsession while living in the present.
- On Earth-19, coffee plants were wiped out and are no longer available. H.R. has a borderline addiction to coffee on Earth-1, while Gypsy isn't much better and ends up smuggling several sacks of coffee beans back to her Earth.
In Fringe, the Alternate Universe has suffered serious ecological deterioration as a result of tears. Several animal species, such as sheep and wallabies, have died out, while a blight is killing off plant life in huge quantities; coffee and avocados are rare commodities.
The Future is Wild begins at 5 MYH with nearly all modern megafauna having died out due to humanity's activities, until about 100 MYH, there's only one species of rodent (the lemming-like Poggle) left out of all mammals. By 200 MYH, all land-based tetrapods have died out.
There was an episode of Kath & Kim set in the future on the day of Kim's wedding. Kath has some Baby's Breath for Kim to wear cryogenically frozen because it's extinct.
In The Last Man on Earth, a virus wipes out not only most of humanity but almost all animal life as well. This is really brought home when Phil and Carol go to Malibu and find dozens of dead whales washed up on the beach.
Life After People: Although many species endangered by human actions make a full recovery once the humans are gone, and others (zoo escapees and invasive species) find new homes, there are also a lot of species dependent on humans for their survival, so they are doomed to follow humanity into oblivion.
- Most dog breeds aren’t equipped for survival without people. Within the first few weeks, the smallest dogs and those with short faces (harder for them to breathe) or short legs (prevents them from running quickly) have died out. Greyhounds and guide dogs don’t last much longer, because greyhounds, while fast and agile enough to hunt, have fragile bodies with thin skin (easily torn) and can’t work as a pack due to their hyper-competitive nature, and guide dogs are trained so thoroughly that many can’t find food and starve to death within a few years. Even breeds that do survive ultimately disappear due to interbreeding with feral dogs and wolves.
- Head lice, body lice, and crab lice are all endemic to the human species, so they die out within only three days after their hosts disappear.
- Domestic turkeys go extinct after just one generation without humanity, as due to selective breeding, they are too heavy to fly or even mount their mates.
- Most domestic reindeer vanish due to having heavier bodies and shorter legs than their caribou cousins, and they have their calves one month earlier than caribou, leaving the reindeer vulnerable to wolves and bears. Within 20 years, the few survivors have reintegrated with caribou.
- Many species that are pests of store products, garden plants, and crops initially thrive without humans to stop them - only to be starved into extinction because there is nothing left for them to eat.
- It’s not just animals - bananas are unable to grow on their own, and their low genetic diversity makes them extremely vulnerable to pathogens, meaning they’re unlikely to survive more than a year. Most crops die out within a few years as well, overrun by weeds and native plants.
Logan's Run: In "Futurepast", it is revealed that many bird species, including the white dove, are either extinct or critically endangered due to the radiation in the atmosphere after the nuclear holocaust in 2119.
The Outer Limits (1995):
- In "Dark Matters", set at an indeterminate point in the future, dogs are seemingly an endangered species as one was included among the zoo animals being shipped by the commercial transport ship Nestor.
- In "Stasis", most species of plants are either extinct or endangered.
- In "Think Like a Dinosaur", most plants and trees on Earth are extinct and fresh air is a thing of the past due to the high level of pollution in the atmosphere.
The third story arc of Sapphire and Steel features a family of time travelers from a distant future where all animal life on Earth is extinct.
In the Sliders episode "Double Cross", Congress in Logan's World has recently placed horses on the endangered species list.
Cows go extinct during the second episode of Snowpiercer when an avalanche breaks the windows of the train's cattle car, freezing the animals and humans on board in seconds. It's unclear if all the cattle in Snowpiercer's agricultural section were on that one car, or if the disaster merely reduced their numbers below the point of genetic recovery; either way, it's described as an "extinction-level event".
Star Trek:
- The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Man Trap" mentions that bison are extinct. This parallels the Monster of the Week being the last of its kind, leading to an Alas, Poor Villain moment from Kirk after it is finally killed, which leaves its whole species extinct as well.
  Spock: Something wrong, Captain?
  Kirk: I was thinking about the buffalo, Mister Spock.
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "New Ground" mentions that the white rhinoceros is extinct.
Supplementary material for Westworld advertises "The Raj", a theme park modeled on late 19th-early 20th century India, as a place where tourists can hunt robotic duplicates of "the animals that cannot be found in our world anymore". It's not specified, but the park has robot elephants, tigers, and peacocks at least.

Music

In the music video for "E.T." by Katy Perry, a plastic case containing a pigeon skeleton reads: 'A common bird, went extinct 2030'.
"No such thing" by Kathy Mar (composed by Zanda Myrande) is entirely built on this trope: in a distant future, a kid is admonished by her parent for making up silly fantasy creatures when she says she sees dolphins, whales and seals in the clouds. In the second verse it's revealed that her parent lied to her out of shame, because they couldn't bear to tell her that the previous generations had driven all sea creatures to extinction, while polluting the air to the point that humanity is now forced to live under crystal domes.
"Robots" by Flight of the Conchords takes place in the distant future of 2000, where all elephants and humans are dead.

Tabletop Games

Blue Planet: Earth's environment wasn't doing well even before the Blight, in particular only five species of whale initially survived long enough to be uplifted: Bottlenose and common dolphins, belugas, orcas, and pilot whales. Somebody cloned and uplifted a pod of sperm whales later on.
Cyberpunk Red:
- The Netrunner class section mentions that whales are extinct.
- The Biotechnica section mentions that koalas and panda bears are extinct, and that Biotechnica's CEO is recreating them and releasing them into the wild, but adding extra features to help them fight better such as koalas with venomous fangs.
Red Dwarf – The Roleplaying Game specifies that iguanas are extinct in the main universe to explain why Lister doesn't know what they are in "The End".
Shadowrun: It's implied by a bit of shadowtalk in The Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America that the gray wolf had gone extinct, but was brought back (probably via cloning) to populate the forests of Tir Tairngire.

Theatre

Maybe Happy Ending: Downplayed. By the time of this future, industrialization has made fireflies all but extinct in Korea, and they can now only be found in the wild on Jeju Island.

Video Games

Awesomenauts: Cocoa plants have gone extinct by the year 3587, apparently somehow due to a time-traveler coming from the future to get cocoa beans. It is the holy mission of the Gelati people to find a living cocoa plant to create their royal ice cream, stracciatella.
BlazBlue: Due to the calamity caused by the Black Beast and the Dark War, the lower elevations of the world (including the seas) have been heavily polluted by Seithr, causing the sea life and several other animals to go extinct.
Much plant and animal life have gone extinct in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun due to tiberium's harmful effects to the environment. In their places are horrible tiberium plant and wildlife which pose great threats to humans such as spore trees which spread more tiberium, overgrown tiberum seaweed which has made sea travel impossible, floaters which use electricity, tiberium fiends which spray tiberium, visceroids which are blobs of things which used to be animals & people and veinhole monsters which swallow the unwary.
Cyberpunk 2077: In keeping with the setting, the environment is in shambles and many species have gone extinct. In one news report, it's mentioned that Omega, the last living koala, has recently passed away.
In Dead Space 2, bees, dolphins, hippos, bears, chimpanzees, eagles, giraffes, elephants, wolves and penguins are all extinct. An advertisement on Titan Station describes a toy line for them called Extinct Animal Friends.
In Detroit: Become Human, a magazine article about the first android zoo states that it exhibits "all exotic species" that went extinct over the past 30 years, specifically mentioning lute turtles, African elephants, mountain gorillas, polar bears, and several unspecified tiger species. A different magazine mentions the impending extinction of bees and the potential of android bees filling in their role.
A conversation between two NPCs in Deus Ex reveals that grizzly bears have been extinct for decades.
Fallout:
- In Fallout: New Vegas, Mr. House mentions that cats are extinct, although it conflicts with previous and future lore — in Fallout 2 cats are mentioned as being hunted for their meat, while Fallout 4 shows cats in person. Considering that Mr. House only sees the outside world through his Securitrons, it's possible that he assumed cats are extinct because there's none in the Mojave wasteland.
- In a dialogue with Rose of Sharon Cassidy, the Courier says that he doesn't know what a fish is. Fish are not extinct in the Fallout universe (in-game, some can even be found in Lake Mead), but considering that someone would not know what a fish is, it implies that they are at least at risk of extinction.
Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach: A Faz-Fact claims that bears are extinct by the time the game is set.
Half-Life 2 takes place twenty years after the Portal Storms caused by the Resonance Cascade teleported so much alien life to Earth that they wiped out most of the native species. The Combine's invasion and exploitation of the planets resources certainly didn't help matters. The only Earth animals seen are birds and barnacles, though crabs, cats, and horses are mentioned, so it's possible they've survived as well. Half-Life: Alyx implies that even common livestock like turkeys and pigs had gone extinct, seemingly so quickly enough that Russell assumes that Alyx, who was a baby when the Resonance Cascade happened, never heard of them.
Heart of the Machine: Following a Contemplation related to the local housing company leads to a casual mention that horses went extinct thanks to the combination of World War III and a climate catastrophe that makes many ex-countries barely habitable. Thus, people have resorted to far weirder choices for animal racing, like the genetically engineered parkour bears said company is running races with.
Horizon Zero Dawn is set several centuries in the future and Mechanical Lifeforms have become especially prominent, replacing many larger animals and being hunted by humans both for practical reasons and for sport. It turns out that it's not just some animals that became extinct but all of them, including humans — a Grey Goo apocalypse took place c. 2064 which humans of the time couldn't stop, only slow down long enough to develop an AI that would devise a way to stop the hostile machines and then clone humans and other animals back into existence. Even so, many are still gone such as wolves, deer, bears, and moose. It's implied that the AI and its support programs intentionally designed many of the machines to resemble now-extinct animals because they were sad that they were gone.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: In Humanities, Congruence mentions that by the time the Stratospheric left Earth, the latter was past the point where both bees and everything they were pollinating had gone extinct.
The video game adaptation of Phantom 2040 features a wildlife memorial with tributes to several extinct animals, including pandas, lions, gorillas, wild boar, kangaroos, mountain goats, snakes, giant turtles, crocodiles and dolphins. A black panther which is believed to be the Last of Its Kind serves as a MacGuffin in the early part of the story.
Inverted in Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time with the Dodo Rider Zombie encountered in the Frostbite Caves. The world takes place during the ice age far before the dodos' extinction by hunting. Its Almanac description shows that the rider imp proclaims that dodos are the future of transportation, while his detractors tell him there's no future in them.
Starfield:
- The description of the Chocolate Labs food item offhandedly remarks that the pieces are "shaped like an extinct canine called a Labrador Retriever."
- For that matter, no Earth-based animals (apart from humans) are seen at all, having apparently perished when the atmosphere did.
Subnautica: According to the PDA of the Cuddlefish, dolphins have gone extinct.
In The Talos Principle has orangutans and other primates being killed off by an incurable virus released from permafrost by Global Warming - with the same virus eventually terminally infecting all humans alive and causing their extinction as well.
In Technobabylon, tigers are mentioned to have gone extinct by 2087. One possible reason is that India is a radioactive hellhole.
In TerraGenesis, it is mentioned that coral reefs died out by mid-21st century.
In the Touhou Project series, the future world of Maribel Hearn and Renko Usami has had many edible plant species go extinct, forcing them to artificially create some foods.
In the WipEout series, tigers went extinct at some point, but fortunately the Nature Hero team Harimau helped them come back through cloning. A track description in Pulse mentions "the last remaining coral reefs," so it looks like Harimau's still got some work to do...
In XCOM 2, after taking over Earth, the aliens exterminated most animals. Lily Shen raises the question of where Advent Burgers come from if cows don't exist anymore.

Webcomics

Runaway to the Stars:
- Climate crisis hasn't made Earth uninhabitable but the world is changed and a number of species of plants and animals, including tigers, are extinct in the wild. Quite a few of them aren't truly extinct and have live captive populations or are extensively represented in gene-banks but even as the world starts to recover it's not considered a good idea to start re-introducing a lot of species on a large scale. Tigers near human settlements are traditionally a dangerous idea. Instead there are many orbital zoos featuring huge "living dioramas" of pre-industrialization ecosystems. Or have prehistoric animals or genetically modified hybrids; the "hat" of humanity is genetic engineering such that giant housecats with tiger-patterned fur are a thing, and indeed Designer Babies with stripes or more extensive animal features as well.
- The aliens called avians have a predator called the seastrike which is roughly analogous to tigers and can be seen in Airsled, but by the "present day" is extinct in the wild.
Unsounded: Since the Ssaelit religion adopted the lion as a symbol of their Deity of Human Origin's martyrdom and ascension, the rival Gefendur church hunted lions to extinction in an unsuccessful attempt to demoralize them.
One xkcd comic has a time traveller from the distant future come to our time to learn about spiders, which have been extinct long enough by their time that only fossil records remain. Played with in that the point of this exchange is not to show the state of the future, but rather, how poorly fossils can really depict a species as it was when it was alive.
Traveler: What's that thing it's sitting in?
Woman: You mean its web? Oh, right, fossils, you wouldn't have known about... Oh my God. Dinosaurs must have been so weird.

Websites

The Neocene Project has nearly all modern megafauna and endangered animals die out by 25 million years in the future thanks to mankind's activities.
SCP Foundation: SCP-4689 is a pride of lions that appeared in Angola in March 2143, with the document specifying that the species went extinct back in 2037. While they didn't appear to be anomalous, the Foundation's Ethics Committee made the decision to euthanize them in 2150 due to genetic bottlenecking and the advanced age of the adult members. The documentation for it was sent back in time to a zoo's storage room in 2019, when lions still exist.

Western Animation

The Captain Planet and the Planeteers episode "Gorillas Will Be Missed" starts in a future where gorillas are extinct.
Futurama: Pine trees, poodles, cows, white rhinos, wheels, human ghosts, the French language, and anchovies are all extinct by the year 3000. The last becomes a plot point in "A Fishful of Dollars" when a recently rich Fry buys the last can of anchovies in existence and Mom schemes to get the can from him because they could make a lubricant that could undersell her biggest product. When Fry announces his intention of eating the can (because anchovy pizza is his favorite), she happily lets him do so. It was Zoidberg's race who ate the anchovies to extinction in the first place, and Zoidberg goes into a frenzy after he eats the rest of Fry's anchovy pizza.
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts takes place in a distant future wherein non-human animals have mutated into either sapient mutes (typically around human-sized) or non-sapient mega-mutes (typically building-sized with extra body parts). Season 3 reveals that the animals that didn't mutate are extinct. They are able to clone non-mutated animals from fossils, but they only do so once, in an attempt to recreate the mutation so they'll know how to cure it.
Love, Death & Robots: In "Three Robots", the robots note that by the time humanity went extinct, they had collapsed most of the food chains and hunted every animal "larger than a cat" to extinction.
The time-traveling syndicate that operates in the background of Milo Murphy's Law know pistachios are extinct by the year 2085. Dakota and Cavendish are tasked with trying to remedy this, but given what happens when they succeed, they end up believing that they're better off extinct.
The Simpsons:
- The Flash Forward episode "Lisa's Wedding" has a holographic image of a tree shown with the description "In memory of a real tree", as apparently all real ones are extinct.
- In a later Flash Forward episode "Mr. Lisa's Opus", a grown-up Lisa mentions that rhinos are extinct.

Extinct in the Future
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Examples

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Anchovies

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Anchovies

Extinct in the Future 5 Following

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Anchovies

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Anchovies

Extinct in the Future
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