“A rare species of rabbit—last seen in 1904—was caught on camera in Mexico, proving that it has not, in fact, gone extinct,” reports The Doomslayer.
Mongabay adds:
Footage captured in 2024 of a small rabbit hopping about in front of a camera trap had scientists baffled. The juvenile, with gray-brown fur and a black tail, didn’t resemble any known species in the Sierra Madre del Sur, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.
Biologist Fernando Ruiz-Gutiérrez anxiously searched his records and consulted with colleagues to confirm his hypothesis. A few kilometers away, ecologist José Alberto Almazán-Catalán had the answer: having captured an adult specimen years earlier and conducted a series of studies, he now had irrefutable proof that the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus insonus), believed to be extinct for the past 120 years, was still alive.
The last time scientists knowingly encountered the Omiltemi cottontail was in 1904, when U.S. naturalist Edward William Nelson described it for the first time. Habitat loss, poaching and subsistence hunting have been the biggest threats to the species throughout its existence, which is why it took more than a century to rediscover the elusive rabbit, hidden in the forest.
The Omitelmi cottontail rabbit is found only in Mexico’s mountainous and rugged state of Guerrero, “in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range. It is a nocturnal, large rabbit, rufous to black in fur color, with long ears and a short tail. This cottontail is restricted to cloud forests at elevations of up to 11,499 feet,” Wikipedia says. Historically, it was found mostly around the village of Omiltemi. “An elusive species with nocturnal habits and low population densities, it’s classified as endangered by Semarnat, Mexico’s environment ministry, and very little is known about its distribution, ecology and biology,” Mongabay says.
A rare flightless grasshopper was recently found in Virginia, where such grasshoppers had not been seen for 79 years.
Brazil’s rarest parrots have made a comeback, avoiding extinction.
In 2023, a dog discovered a species of mole long thought to be extinct, De Winton’s golden mole.
