Extinct Animals/people that I will get teary over on bad mental health days, an incomplete list:
Pterosaurs: they are all gone, they have no legacy, and if/when humanity goes extinct the fossils we excavated might be damaged so no future people will know of them. Though that latter part applies to everyone on this list. Still, the first dynasty of flying vertebrates, an entire branch of reptiles, extinguished.
Every Synapsid that wasn’t a mammal: our family tree only has one branch remaining, all our kin our gone except for Mammalia. The nonavian dinosaurs are gone, but birds persist and the wider tree of sauropsids (possibly misspelled) endure. But out Kim our gone.
Neanderthals: we meet them, we knew them, some of us loved them. We carry their genes in us, we are their legacy. And what are we doing with that status as the last of the hominids? Destroying each other and devastating the environment. We are currently causing a mass extinction, and if our leaders decide to make a horrible decision, they could annihilate the planet’s biosphere in like an hour :(
Homo floresiensis: I’m not even sure if we meet these guys. They came and went potentially with no humans ever meeting them, we only discovered they existed this century. They are just forgotten. They were contemporaries with us and they just are gone. At least we carry on Neanderthals through us, and they are well known. The halflings are just lost. :(
