I’m talking about the species that might be extinct, or might still be out there somewhere in some isolated refuge - or those ones that have never been spotted again since they were first seen and described. Maybe they don’t even exist, or maybe they do… somewhere. We all know about the Ivory-Bille…

I know a campaign here in New Zealand had the official status of the South Island kokako (a bird) changed from ‘extinct’ to ‘data deficient’, so that might be a category where species possible not extinct are put.

The greasefish (Rhizosomichthys totoae) looks like a living chewed piece of gum and I love it.

For me, it’s Xyris bracteicaulis, as its last known location is only 30 minutes from where I am, and is/was only 2 species endemic to Long Island. However, it hasn’t been seen since 1907, but who knows?

[image] yayemaster: Xyris bracteicaulis That one sounds cool! You never know, maybe there’s a patch of it clinging on somewhere. I wonder how long the seeds can persist in the soil seedbank? Malacothamnus mendocinensis , the Mendocino bush mallow, was last reported in 1939 and hadn’t been fou…

Wouldn’t it be something to find a lost population of Eoanthropus dawsoni?

Metriopelma breyeri has to be my pick, it is in a monophyletic genus, and I haven’t seen a picture of it. It is a tarantula found in Guanajuato.

A note of hope for finding these species! “Conservationists find native magnolia for first time since 1925 after original habitat destroyed by deforestation” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/03/magnolia-species-lost-to-science-for-97-years-rediscovered-in-haiti

Perhaps an unoriginal choice, but Psephurus gladius, the Chinese Paddlefish. One of the world’s largest freshwater fishes done in by pollution and overhunting. So sad that it is now lost, leaving only one living member of it’s family, the American Paddlefish. If the American Paddlefish is lost too, …

Yssolebias (ex Cyprinodon) martae, a killifish collected only once in XIX century near Santa Marta, in Colombia, and with a disputed taxonomy Frans Vermeulen made many trips to find this species again, but always failed https://www.itrainsfishes.net/content/yssolebias_martae_001.php

The attempt at breedinf blight resistant trees is not that fruitful. I dove into Am Chestnuts wanting to reintroduce them to our forest. The most blight tolerant ones (which still are far from resistant) look like their asian counterparts and would not give the size nor shape of American chestnuts. …

What's your favorite "lost" species?

Nature Talk

jasonhernandez74 August 15, 2022, 2:37pm 88

My guess is that I mis-spelled the name, since I didn’t have the book to hand when I wrote that. So it seems it isn’t a “lost” species after all.

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What's your favorite "lost" species?

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