The world no longer has the gastric-brooding frog, the pig-footed bandicoot or the blue-tailed skink in the wild.
But these Australian species didn't disappear 100 years ago – the losses are much more recent.
To raise awareness of what has so recently been lost, biologist Tim Low has co-authored a report that lists, like a eulogy, the 23 native animals lost since the 1960s.
Australia is missing more mammals than any other continent, but the list goes on, including frogs, lizards, fish, insects and plants.
Titled Gone: Australian Animals Extinct Since the 1960s, the report cites the work of 10 biologists who in 2019 found that since colonisation, of the 100 extinct species studied, 36 were killed off by land clearing.
And while climate change, fire, pollution and other ecological hazards also played a role, nothing matched the exterminating force of invasive species and diseases – which claimed 45 of the 100 extinct species.
But when looking at modern extinctions, the impact of introduced species is even more significant, accounting for 81 per cent of the 21 recent species lost.
Since the 1960s wolf snakes, rats and chytrid fungus, among others, have become the major culprits, the report said.
Loading..."We're talking about this really serious narrowing of biodiversity that is not being properly appreciated," Mr Low said.
"It's a real challenge to the paradigms that we have about conservation."
A wave of extinctions
Mr Low recalls holding a southern gastric brooding in the wild as a "very distant memory".
"It was discovered that the female frog was opening her mouth and basically swallowing her young and shutting down her stomach acids and rearing the young inside," he said.
"It was world famous, no other frogs in the world do that and no-one ever imagined that they were under any threat."
But the extinction of the northern and southern gastric brooding frogs, as well as four others, is now known to have been caused by the invasion of a single pathogen through the port of Brisbane in 1970s: chytrid fungus.
Mr Low said it was the beginning of a "wave of extinctions" that moved into the mountains near the Sunshine Coast, jumping up to the rainforests west of Mackay and further north.
"As ducks and egrets are flying from river system to river system, they [could be] moving the fungus, which can swim in the water," he said.
"It's so challenging for us to think about because we think of extinction going with bulldozers, with massive human impacts, and here we're looking at incredibly pristine environments losing a species of frog."
Mr Low has similarly sad memories of Christmas Island forest skinks, which started disappearing in the 1980s.
"Just to think that I have seen that lizard — so shiny, so alert, so agile — that species has gone," he said.
"It's just hard to believe that in this modern age, we have all these extinct animals [that] we have these amazingly high-quality photos of.
"[But] no-one can see what I saw."
Plants suffer similar fate
In a stark reminder that the losses are not only among animals, Mr Low said there had been no wild fruits from native guava trees recorded for 10 years.
"I remember tasting the fruits, quite a resinous, succulent taste," he said.
Now, across most of New South Wales and Queensland, the once-thriving native guava tree is dead, having succumbed to the invasive fungal plant disease myrtle rust.
"I don't think most Australians realise this is going on, and that that disease [myrtle rust], it wasn't here before 2010," he said.
"The speed at which things are happening is incredible."
Biosecurity threats
Understanding these extinctions is an important part of preventing future extinctions, according to the report.
Twenty-two species of fish, four species of frogs, as well as many lizards and snakes, are very close to extinction due to invasive species.
In the plant world, myrtle rust is threatening at least 16 native species.
Report co-author Carol Booth, an Invasive Species Council principal policy analyst, said far more needs to be done to tackle the scourge of invasive species.
"If you're going to stop extinctions, you need to do an awful lot more about invasive species threats," she said.
"We can manage big herbivores with aerial shooting, and foxes with aerial baiting, but for a lot of other species, we really don't have an effective method."
With climate change and bushfires likely to play more of a role in modern extinction in the coming years, the authors of the report have issued a plea for all Australians to take heed, and to take an interest in biosecurity.