Having more time on my hands then I know what to do with, I wandered over to the IUCN to peruse the Red Book. Frustrated that they don't list the 785 extinct species by date of death, I randomly picked a few to look at. Of the four I read about, it was the third one, a mollusk that was suspected in 1996 as extinct, and confirmed in 2001 by actual survey.
The second and fourth I read about died out about 100 years ago and 300 years ago, respectively:
"Dominican Green-and-yellow Macaw Ara atwoodi is known only from the writings of Atwood in 1791, and was endemic to Dominica. Atwood notes that birds were captured both for food and pets, and presumably this persecution led to their extinction in the late 18th or early 19th century. Taxonomy Clark initially included macaws from Dominica in A. guadeloupensis, but on discovery of Atwood's text, described them as distinct.
Red Rail Aphanapteryx bonasia was endemic to Mauritius from where it is known from a number of travelers' accounts and illustrations, and from numerous bones. It was mentioned to have become rare by Leguat in 1693, and there were no further reports, so the species, which was flightless and palatable, was presumably hunted to extinction around 1700. Taxonomy Kuina mundyi and Pezocrex herberti are synonyms."
Alarmingly, the very first of the 785 that I sampled never existed at all, and yet is included in the list! This is what they have to say about the Arabian Gazelle:
"This enigmatic antelope is known only from a single male specimen in the Berlin Museum, apparently collected in 1825 and attributed to the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea. However, there is some doubt as to whether the specimen in fact originated from the Farasans and its former distribution and status may never be known (Mallon and Kingswood 2001). Skull characteristics distinguish the specimen from all other gazelles, and the gazelles that now occur on the Farasan Islands are a subspecies of G. ga*****. G. arabica was considered Extinct by the Antelope Specialist Group (East et al. 1996).
MacPhee and Flemming (1999) disagreed with the Extinct categorisation on the grounds of taxonomic uncertainties about the validity of the species. However, given the distinctiveness of the taxon, and the fact that no further information has come to light, Extinct is considered to remain the most appropriate category."
I am ever more confident that claims of "mass extinction" are at best gross exaggeration, if not wholesale fabrications!
The Independent published a "report" in July 2006 that made this absurd claim: "Many plants have yet to be formally described, classified and named - and some are being lost before they have been discovered by scientists." Really!
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0720-08.htm
And if you read that story, you will see that there is nothing beyond the implication of doom. "More than a decade ago, Edward O Wilson, the Harvard naturalist, first estimated that about 30,000 species were going extinct each year - an extinction rate of about three an hour. Further research has confirmed that just about every group of animals and plants - from mosses and ferns to palm trees, frogs, and monkeys - is experiencing an unprecedented loss of diversity." To quote just one unsubstantiated claim. If this is true, why is it not reflected in the IUCN Red Book list? Someone is pulling a fast one here, wouldn't you think?
Why do you think there is such a difference between the claims in the press (Thousands of extinctions) and the IUCN Red Book?