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This is very exciting news. The Coelacanth was also extinct - for several hundred million years - until it wasn't. Maybe Tasmanian tiger this year and Mokele-m

• walrus01 7y ago
  Local fishermen caught coelacanth all the time, they had no idea that university-educated foreigners considered it to be extinct.
• rectangletangle 7y ago
  The New Caledonian crested gecko was thought to be extinct for over 100 years until they were rediscovered in 1994. Now they're common place in the pet trade because they're so hardy. Rediscovery of "extinct" species is common place, because of the inherent difficulty in proving that all individuals of a given species are dead. Combine this with the robustness of biology, allowing species to quickly boom under favorable conditions, and then false extinction ends up happening more often than you would probably suspect. It's normal for many healthy populations to fluctuate wildly around a given carrying capacity. r-selected organisms are particularly notorious for having like 95% of the population die off regularly, and then bouncing back in a few years. In the case of the thylacine, it's a macro organism so it probably has a higher profile when compared to a small gecko. So the likelihood that they're still extant probably isn't quite as high, unfortunately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crested_gecko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crested_gecko