![]() This is why a new global search effort is calling on researchers, conservationists and the global birdwatching community to mount the Search for Lost Birds, through a collaboration between BirdLife International (through our Preventing Extinctions Programme), American Bird Conservancy (BirdLife in the US) and Re:wild, with data support from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its eBird Platform.įor the purposes of this initiative, ‘lost’ species are those with no documented sighting in the wild for at least 10 years and that are not classified as Extinct on the Red List. As the biodiversity and extinction crises worsen, uncertainties like this can cloud our understanding of the situation, and make it harder to set the right conservation priorities. Such knowledge gaps beg to be filled, and can inspire fieldworkers who may relish the chance to get out and look for them, often in the biologically richest parts of the planet, and potentially make other discoveries too. It turns out that dozens of other bird species (not to mention other animals and plants) are in a similar state: ‘lost’ but not presumed Extinct. And so it remains on the Red List, as Critically Endangered: mysterious but not Extinct. Could the lack of records be because it represents an ‘aberrant’ or unusual-looking individual of another species? But no other species comes close to a likeness, allowing for any known form of aberration. There are grounds to think it is not extinct: a reasonable area of forest survives on Negros, with more on the nearby island of Panay, which holds almost all the same species, and there have been reports from local people of birds fitting its description. Ornithological exploration of the island had begun long before and has continued since, yet this remains the only report. The first and only record came from the forests of the Philippine island of Negros in 1953. Or should we say ‘was’ a beautiful bird – could it be extinct? Since its discovery, it has proved even more deserving of its scientific name arcanus, meaning secret or hidden, than its (evidently surprised) discoverers realised. The AP is solely responsible for all content.The Negros Fruit-dove is, like its close relatives of the genus Ptilinopus, a beautiful bird, with vivid green plumage marked with bright yellow on the wing and belly, and a wide, yellow ring around the eye. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. sapiens from Neanderthals and other related species, and that several lines of evidence support the identification.Īt a press conference, Harvati said it’s not clear whether scientists will be able to recover DNA or proteins from the fossil to confirm its identity. In response, Harvati said the back of the skull is very useful for differentiating H. sapiens “pretty shaky.” Its shape is suggestive, but it’s incomplete and it lacks features that would make the identification firmer, he said in an email. Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York called the case for identifying the fossil as H. Warren Sharp, an expert on dating fossils at the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, said the age of 210,000 years is “not well supported by the data.” Did Neanderthals out-compete them?īut some other scientists are not convinced the fossil’s reported age and identification are correct. Now the question is what happened to these people, he said. Harvati said finding evidence that our species had reached Greece by that time was initially a surprise, though in hindsight “it’s not that difficult to imagine that it would have happened.”Įric Delson of Lehman College in New York, who did not participate in the study, said the discovery was somewhat surprising but that southeastern Europe “makes a lot of sense” for a finding that old. ![]() To identify what species it came from, the researchers compared a virtual reconstruction to the shapes of fossils from known species. To establish the age, they analyzed bits of bone from the fossil. Harvati and others report the results of their analysis in the journal Nature.
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