No Chance

Yangtse dolphin 'is extinct', a victim of economic explosion "Instead, the dolphin was driven to destruction by the noise of the traffic, which disrupted the sonic waves it used to navigate — it was virtually blind, its tiny eyes useless in the murky, sedimented water of the river.

In addition, overfishing had cut its food supplies by half, while the huge Three Gorges Dam had interfered with current and sandbank patterns. The World Conservation Union will only declare a species formally extinct once there is "no reasonable doubt", but Mr Pfluger said it was too late to hold out any more hope."

There's actually a blog that covers these based on Douglas Adam's, "Last Chance to See", called "Another Chance to See". As he said, "There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them."

The whole expedition is available in blog form at Blog Baji.org, where the race goes on to stop the extinction of another Yangtze inhabitant the finless porpoises. They say, "The baiji is Functionally extinct. Lipotes vexilifier is the first species of cetacean – whales, dolphins and porpoises – to disappear from our globe in modern times…the first large mammal to go extinct as a result of man’s destruction of their natural habitat and ressources."

At least there's still the Kakapo to be seen.