Somes species have become extinct. What are some properties that they do not have that help them to survive for a long period of time?

it's not so much inability to survive long periods of time, it is the inability to survive whatever conditions face them at that particular time. Those conditions might be either weather related, predator related, food/resource related or a host of other things.

Somes species have become extinct. What are some properties that they do not have that help them to survive for a long period of time?

 

that some species you refer to, taken over the course of the last 3.x billion of years of earth history, constitute about 90% (or slightly more than 90%) of all life forms(spefies) that have ever existed thus far

Historically (lol, as in since life began) extinction was caused by drastic changes in the environment within a short period of time that species could not deal with. An example of this is the massive extinction that happened when Earth atmosphere was transformed to a oxygen rich atmosphere by the cyanobacteria. This change messed with all those wonderful little creatures that were roaming around being anaerobic. O2 killed them off. The ones that survived had already evolved to be able to keep living in the O2 rich environment.

 

More recently though, say oh the past 5000 or so years, extinction has come about directly from competition with humans. Humans decide to change stuff quickly and animals just cannot keep up, and therefore they die. We do this directly when the animal in question holds something of value to us, like oh let's say whales... Even if we don't directly kill them off we can do this by destroying and polluting their habitats (foresting, and industrial run-off).

 

And who says humans aren't efficient!