Lost animal species that returned from extinction

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Wallace’s giant bee​

In 1859, Alfred Russell Wallace discovered the largest bee in the world in Indonesia and promptly named it after himself, as one does. Wallace’s giant bee was thought to be extinct until more specimens were found in 1981 and put in museums.

 

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Wallace’s giant bee​

They went quiet again after that, but in 2019 a group retraced Wallace's steps through Indonesia in the hopes of finding the species of bee still alive, and managed to lay eyes on one living example.

 

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Sierra Leone crab​

The distinctive Sierra Leone crab had not been sighted since 1955, and was believed to be extinct. But in 2021, a researcher named Pierre Mvogo Ndongo traveled to Sierra Leone and spent three weeks searching for the crab. He managed to find six of them with the help of the local people. The crabs had migrated inland away from water sources and adapted to breath air.

 

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Black browed babbler​

Prior to its miraculous rediscovery in 2020, this beautiful little bird was only observed by scientists once in the 1840s. It then disappeared for around 170 years, before two locals reported sightings in the forest of South Kalimantan in Indonesia.

 

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Chapman’s pygmy chameleon​

This tiny chameleon, which measures around 2.2 inches (5.5 cm), was spotted for the first time in the Malawi rain forest in 1992 and promptly disappeared. In the following decades, nearly 80% of the Malawi rain forest was destroyed, and Chapman’s pygmy chameleon was believed to have been lost along with it. Incredibly, the persistent lizard survived and was spotted again in 2016.

 

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Fernandina giant tortoise​

The species of giant tortoise called chelonoidis phantastica disappeared more than a century ago and was long believed to be extinct. But in 2019, 112 years after the last sighting, researchers came across a single female tortoise. She was found living on Fernandina Island in the Galápagos, which is how she got her name. She is the only living example of her kind, as far as researchers know.

 

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De-extinction​

The examples we've seen so far are of animals that were believed to be extinct, but were in fact quietly surviving away from prying eyes. Sometimes animals come back from the brink in a more controversial way. De-extinction, also rather dramatically known as resurrection biology, refers to the process of generating an organism that was truly extinct. Cloning is the most common method that scientists are working on.

 

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Pyrenean ibex​

The Pyrenean ibex, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex (pictured), is the only 'successful' case of de-extinction scientists have achieved through cloning. Tissue samples were taken from the final living Pyrenean ibex in 1999, and when she died, a clone was made by implanting nuclei from her cells into a goat egg, which they then used to impregnate more than 200 goats.

 

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Pyrenean ibex​

Only one of the baby ibex lived to term, but was born with a lung defect and died within minutes of its birth. This was still seen as a great triumph and is considered to be the first true de-extinction.

 

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Aldabra rail​

The Aldabra rail was a flightless bird that went extinct 136,000 years ago. An almost identical species emerged 100,000 years ago. Sea levels dropped, which allowed the species of bird to become flightless again, resulting in the Aldabra rail 2.0, as it were.