If you thought yesterday’s blog post on bringing extinct woolly mammoths back to life was pretty cool, check out today’s post on a crazy little critter known as “Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna.” Scientists have always thought of this animal as an egg-laying mammal (also known as a monotreme) that went extinct over 30 years ago. But scientists around the world will now have to rethink their thinking! Why? Because Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna has been discovered alive and well! It was living in the tropical jungles of the Cyclops Mountain Reserve (great name huh?) on the south Pacific island of Papua-New Guinea the whole time. When scientists sent an expedition to study this jungle, a jungle that hadn’t been explored by scientists for over 45 years, they found boroughs and other signs that the creatures had recently been living in the jungle. Locals reported seeing the critters over the last few years as well. That means that the little animals, which look a lot like spiky footballs with really long noses, are officially back in the world of the living!

At this point you’re probably wondering what went wrong in the first place. How could a creature be labelled extinct when it was happily munching on earthworms the whole time?  An organism is extinct when every last individual of the species (a unique type of organism) is dead. Or at least, we think they are dead. The world is a pretty big place after all. Some places, such as parts of tropical jungles and the bottom of the ocean, are very hard to get to. This means scientists can be wrong from time to time, just as they were about Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna. There are other animals that may have been wrongly labelled in the same way. For example, the ivory-billed woodpecker, not seen since 1944, may still be living happily in the Cache River National Wildlife Reserve in Arkansas! But evidence must be good to prove that a creature is not extinct, and in this case it is great: Enter the video evidence! Maybe this will be a wake up call for politicians to continue funding wildlife reserves. After all, they really seem to be doing their jobs…the proof in on the tape! To learn more about the story of this long-lost woodpecker, check out http://www.ivorybill.org/