I feel like surely almost everyone has at least one critter on their wishlist that they know they may never see, but they think it would be super cool anyway. The critically endangered rusty-patched bumblebee is believed to be extinct in my area, but sometimes i look at a bumblebee and for just a moment, think “what if?”
I’ve also been scouring my local grocery store for a few summers now looking for the Watermelon mosaic virus to no avail, and I’ve had no luck with iridoviruses either. And don’t even get me started on animals with weird mutations… i could nerd out over that all night!
I would (unrealistically) love to find Trilepidea adamsii (Adams mistletoe), its natural range was close to where I live but the last specimen ever collected was in the 1950s. Its extinction is attributed to habitat loss, over-collecting and possum browsing. It was a beautiful semi-parasitic mistletoe native to only a small area in NZ.
Zanzibar Leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) Although it is a myth and extinct since 1980.
But there were always attempts to bring the myth back to life. In 2018, a leopard was recorded on Zanzibar by a camera trap . But authorities do not consider this video to be reliable evidence due to the exact locality of the video being unknown, and few reliable sources have picked up on it.
I would love to see a Northern Bald Ibis in the wild, there’s only about 700 left in the wild. (Most in Morocco but some in Europe). I got to see a few in the Edinburgh Zoo which definitely solidified them as a species I need to see again. Maybe one day!
Any subterranean workerless parasitic ant species. Basically the only way they are known to science is when researchers dig out whole nests of some other ant species and happen to find those queens in there.
I’ve wanted to see Kagu ever since I saw them in The Life of Birds as a kid. I’ve seen one at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago but I doubt I’ll ever be in a life position to make a trip all the way to New Caledonia just to see a single species of bird in the wild.
Harpy Eagle - trip planned for Costa Rica in a couple years, but itinerary does not include stops in their range, and their extremely rare their anyways.
Maryland Shrew - no living specimen has ever been photographed, and it might be a synonym of the masked shrew, but I’m in their range, so…
Thylacine - might as well be the person to mention the holy grail of recently extinct animals
A flamingo in Pennsylvania - not quite as ridiculous as it seems
there are a number of cool neuropteran insects I’ll never see unless I take a trip to Africa or Australia, which is… not something I anticipate doing, unfortunately.
Unrealistic? I’d like to see a T. rex. I’ve always wondered if they have a sweet tooth and whether they’d love gummy bears as much as I think they would.
any australian/NZ species.. from the classic kangaroos (any species) and other vertebrates to arthropod life and underwater fauna.. it is just very unrealistic that I will ever visit that area of the planet
Very neat looking, like crop circles on watermelon. Unfortunately, something like that won’t even make it to a typical grocery store. Stuff with deformities or that just doesn’t look right is often thrown away long before a consumer would see it.
Maybe not entirely unrealistic, but my most ‘wanted to see’ organism is the Scarlet Ibis in the wild. Unfortunately, my traveling has been curtailed for the foreseeable future (because of, you know, Life) so it’s a bit of a pie-in-the-sky wish.
To echo some previous comments, for the past few decades, they have been “very close” to bringing back recently extinct species, for which we have relatively fresh samples of DNA. So for myself, as well as for all other humans, I hope it happens in our lifetime!
I would love to count Passenger Pigeon on my life list but based on my understanding of the project personally I would consider any such de-extincted bird a Passenger Pigeon x Band-tailed Pigeon chimera (perhaps eventually a new species if they’re able to maintain a wild population for generations), and similar for any of the other de-extinction targets.
