The past year brought a glimmer of positive conservation news as several animal species thought to be extinct were rediscovered.
Species have gone extinct at a much higher rate than is expected with evolution, and the blame has largely been placed on humans and their detrimental impact on certain species’ environments. Experts believe that the modern extinction rate is as much as 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate, according to the World Wildlife Fund. But rediscovering a species previously thought to be extinct provides a spark of hope.
The animals found across the globe included such species as reptiles, fish and mammals.
In October, an extinct colony of little penguins was reestablished after 30 years when a chick hatched for the first time since 1993. A breeding pair finally returned to the Eagles Claw Nature Reserve, located in Eden, Australia. Researchers thought that predators such as foxes had hunted the species to extinction.
Typically, a species is declared extinct if it hasn’t been sighted for more than 50 years. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) followed the guidelines for decades, but the organization refined them in the 1990s so that a species can be listed as extinct if there is