The Lítla Dímun sheep (Dímunarseyðurin) was a type of short-tailed sheep endemic to

Lítla Dímun Lítla Dímun is a small, uninhabited island between the islands of Suðuroy and Stóra Dímun in the Faroe Islands. It is the smallest of the main 18 islands, being less than a square kilometre (247 acres) in area, and is the only uninhabited ...

in the

Faroe Islands The Faroe Islands ( ), or simply the Faroes ( fo, Føroyar ; da, Færøerne ), are a North Atlantic island group and an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. They are located north-northwest of Scotland, and about halfway bet ...

. It became extinct in the mid-19th century. It was a

feral A feral () animal or plant is one that lives in the wild but is descended from domesticated individuals. As with an introduced species, the introduction of feral animals or plants to non-native regions may disrupt ecosystems and has, in some ...

sheep, probably derived from the earliest

sheep Sheep or domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') are domesticated, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Although the term ''sheep'' can apply to other species in the genus ''Ovis'', in everyday usage it almost always refers to domesticated s ...

brought to Northern Europe in the

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several parts ...

Period.Ryder, M L, (1981), "A survey of European primitive breeds of sheep", ''Ann. Génét. Sél. Anim.'', 13 (4), p 400.
/ref> The last of these very small, black, short-wooled sheep were shot in the 1860s. It was similar in appearance and origin to the surviving

Soay sheep The Soay sheep is a breed of domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') descended from a population of feral sheep on the island of Soay in the St Kilda Archipelago, about from the Western Isles of Scotland. It is one of the Northern European short-t ...

, from the island of

Soay Soay (pronounced "soy") is the name of several Scottish islands. It is Sòdhaigh (sometimes anglicised "Soaigh") in Scottish Gaelic, and comes from the Old Norse ''so-ey'' meaning "island of sheep". It may refer to: * Soay, Inner Hebrides off sout ...

in the St Kilda archipelago off the west coast of Scotland. Soay is an island of very similar size and topography as Lítla Dímun, and has similarly difficult access. The sheep now living on Lítla Dímun are Faroes sheep, a more domesticated short-tailed type.

References

Sheep breeds Extinct sheep breeds {{sheep-stub