Scientists Thought They'd Been Extinct for 6,000 Years
Known only from ancient fossils, two marsupial species were presumed extinct for over 6,000 years — until scientists found them alive in a remote New Guinea rainforest, with help from Indigenous communities who knew they were there all along.
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Six thousand years ago, two small animals vanished from the fossil record. No one alive has ever seen one. Until now.
Scientists just found them alive, in a rainforest most maps barely bother to detail.
Here's how rare this is. Every so often, a species known only from old bones turns out to still be alive somewhere, quietly, off the map. Scientists call these Lazarus species, after the man in the Bible brought back from the dead. Finding even one is considered a near-impossible long shot. Researchers working in a remote, rarely surveyed stretch of New Guinea's rainforest went looking anyway, because the fossils in that specific region hadn't been fully checked against what might still be living there today.
They didn't find one Lazarus species. They found two.
The first is a pygmy long-fingered possum, a small striped animal a little over a foot long, with one dramatically elongated finger on each hand. Scientists think it uses that finger, guided by unusually specialized ears tuned to faint sounds, to listen for wood-boring grubs hidden inside rotting logs, then fish them out one by one. The second is a nocturnal glider with a long, powerful tail it uses to grip branches and vines as it moves through the canopy. It turned out to be so distinct that researchers gave it an entirely new genus, one they named to honor the local word for the animal, rather than folding it into an existing group.
None of this would have been confirmed without the people who already knew these animals were out there. Researchers worked directly with the Tambrauw and Maybrat Indigenous communities, whose own knowledge helped verify both species. Some of these communities consider the glider sacred, believing it carries the spirits of their ancestors, and they've long protected the old-growth forest it depends on.
When the two papers describing these animals published this spring, the lead researcher didn't mince words: finding one Lazarus mammal is almost impossible. Finding two together, in the same effort, he called unprecedented.
Other scientists reacted the way you'd hope. One called it a rare dose of pure joy in a field that spends most of its time delivering bad news. And it's a reminder worth sitting with: sometimes "extinct" just means nobody's looked hard enough yet, in the right place, with the right people beside them.
The exact location is being kept quiet, to protect these two rediscovered animals from collectors before scientists even finish learning how they live.
Sources: australian.museum · smithsonianmag.com
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