Home to the World's Recently Extinct and Rediscovered Plants and Animals

This website attempts to document the world's many recently lost and rediscovered organisms. To capture as many of the last rays of their dead or dying lights as possible before they fade away forever. To echo the sorrow felt by the lingering ghosts of species lost. As they wander, swim, fly, grow, and otherwise move, now silently and invisibly, through their former habitats. And to point to the many second chances that we have been given via rediscoveries. To save species from the fate we thought they had already succumbed to. Tragically even then we do not always heed nature's warning (e.g.  the Desert rat-kangaroo, Caloprymnus campestris).

To offer a window into the newest house of mass extinction currently under construction, whose structure was designed by the architects of the current biodiversity crisis: us humans. Built upon a foundation consisting of the innate vulnerability of populations, particularly those that are small or isolated, to fatal declines. We are in the midst of a global problem, an extinction rate far above abnormal. The inevitable loss of all biodiversity in a temporally distant supernova does not render the current biodiversity crisis any less anachronistic.

And to emphasise the role that active conservation, both in situ and ex situ, can play in saving those creatures on the edge. By detailing successful programs implemented to rewild species such as the Californian Condor, nene (Hawaiian goose), Przewalski's horse and Père David's deer. But most importantly trying to downplay cloning and the potential for "de-extinction" that it brings. Talk of technological advances that will more than likely end in complacency rather than real results. After all in many cases we possess no viable genetic material from lost populations. Most extinctions have gone unnoticed.