Extinct and endangered animals since 1500
For more than two decades, there had been no confirmed record. Now it is certain: The Mindoro bleeding-heart (Gallicolumba platenae) lives on. In August 2026, a camera trap photographed a single bird on the Philippine island of Mindoro—the first confirmed image of the Critically Endangered species since 2005. This predominantly
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The Ghana cuckooshrike has been photographed—and even filmed—for the first time in 13 years. In the case of the Mindoro imperial pigeon, however, a previously unpublished photo was enough for the species to lose its “lost” status. Both cases show how important accessible documentation of rare species is. Within a
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The blue-fronted lorikeet (Charmosynopsis toxopei) has been documented again. In April 2026, an expedition team documented the rare parrot species in the highlands of Mount Kapalatmada on the Indonesian island of Buru. It is the first confirmed record since 2014 and only the second confirmed observation of the species since
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There are animal species worldwide whose populations have now shrunk to just a few dozen or even only single individuals. Many of them stand on the brink of extinction and survive only in small refuges or through elaborate conservation programs. The main cause of their decline is humans, for example
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In November 2025, the Sulu cuckooshrike (Coracina guillemardi) was documented again for the first time in almost two decades in the remote forests of Tawi-Tawi in the Sulu Archipelago in the southwest of the Philippines. The species was considered lost—not officially extinct, but without any confirmed records for years. The
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The kouprey is considered one of the most mysterious wild cattle in the world. First described by Western scientists only in 1937, this shy animal from the tropical forests of the tri-border region of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia remained scarcely studied for decades. Many zoologists saw the kouprey as a
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It is one of the rarest turtle species in the world — it may even be the rarest of all: the Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei). The species is critically endangered and may already have disappeared from the wild. At present, only two male individuals are known worldwide. Yet
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The riddle of Schomburgk’s deer “No one seems ever to have seen this animal; all that we think we know about it is the existence of its antlers”, noted Phya Jolamark Bhicharana wrote in 1932 about Schomburgk’s deer. The American biologist Francis Harper also wrote in 1945 that this deer—which
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Biologist Tom Terzin of the University of Alberta discovered two species of weevil in the rainforests of the Philippine island of Negros: one previously thought extinct and one entirely new species. What is especially interesting is that the finds, published in the journal Topola, show nature’s ability to recover after
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How the Sumatran rhinoceros came to London In February 1868, some villagers captured a female Sumatran rhinoceros on the Sangu River near the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a mountainous region in southeastern Bangladesh—such a species had never before been reported so far west of Chittagong. The rhinoceros came into the possession
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