"So long and thanks for all the fish," said a dolphin in a memorable scene in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This was the final farewell of dolphins as they left the planet, because man failed to listen to their warning of impending doom.

This may not be the appropriate epitaph for the Yangtze River Dolphin, but it states clearly how mankind fails to listen as yet another great species is wiped off the face of the Earth.

After scouring the Yangtze river for six weeks in search of the dolphin, called the Baiji, marine biologists found not even a single one. The expedition's goal was to find and place the dolphins within a sanctuary and breeding program but was unfortunately too late.

A year after failing to find a single specimen, the Baiji was officially declared extinct, and its demise was laid on the hands of the great number of container ships and fisherman in the river, whose nets and hooks were the cause of more than half of the dead Baiji in the river.  Pollution and the creation of the dam blocked off most of their food supply. All of these factors could have been avoided with the proper precautions but instead man is again responsible for the extinction of another species.

The Yangtze river dolphin's extinction marks the first of the cetacean family (the same family of whales and dolphins) to be wiped off because of human activity. The dolphin was special in its own way and had its own family branch. Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London, who led the expedition to find the dolphin, said:

The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy. This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet. [...] There is a lot of interest now in the baiji - but it has come too late. Why does no one pay attention to a species until there are none left? We really have to use the baiji as a wake-up call to act immediately to prevent it happening again.