Biologists have a name for organisms declared extinct that later turn up alive: Lazarus species — named after the man in the Bible who rose from the dead. There is one crucial difference: unlike Lazarus, these animals were never really dead. They were just hiding very well.
Here are six of the best stories.
The Coelacanth: A Fish from the Age of Dinosaurs
On December 22, 1938, in East London, South Africa, museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer got a phone call from a fishing-boat captain. He had caught something strange.
On the deck she found a 1.5-meter fish, steel-blue with a pearl-like sheen and armor-thick scales. Its fins were not the thin membranes of ordinary fish — they were fleshy, like four thick legs. "Like a beautiful Chinese porcelain ornament," she later recalled.
She saved the specimen and wrote to South Africa's leading fish expert, James Smith. Held up by Christmas post, the letter arrived on January 3, 1939. Smith saw her sketch and knew at once: this was a coelacanth — a fish believed to have gone extinct 66 million years ago, alongside the dinosaurs.
"It was like a white-hot explosion hit me," Smith wrote after seeing it in person. He published the discovery in Nature and named the fish Latimeria chalumnae, after its discoverer.
Fourteen years later, in December 1952, a second living coelacanth was caught — in the Comoros, thousands of kilometers away. Local fishers said they caught these fish regularly. They called it gombessa; dried, its flesh was good eating and its rough scales served as sandpaper.
The coelacanth had never disappeared. It had simply been living in deep water all along.
Coelacanths are lobe-finned fish — the lineage that links fish to land animals. Their fleshy fins contain bones that may be the prototype of our own limbs. In 2013, the genome was sequenced: coelacanth evolution is slow, but it never stopped. About 500 individuals survive in two populations, one in the western Indian Ocean and one off Indonesia, living in underwater caves 150–700 meters deep. That is why we almost never see them.
The Takahē: The Blue Ghost of New Zealand
In 1948 New Zealand, Geoffrey Orbell was studying yellowed bird records, and everyone thought he was wasting his time. The takahē — New Zealand's largest flightless bird, up to 4 kg with brilliant blue-green plumage — had been officially declared extinct after its last confirmed sighting in 1898.
Fifty years. Nobody believed it still existed. Except Orbell.
"Only four takahē were ever found before 1898. It was considered extinct. But that word 'considered' fired my boyhood sense of adventure," he later wrote.
He analyzed every record, mapped the bird's habitat preferences — high-altitude grasslands, far from people — and concluded that if takahē survived anywhere, it was the most remote mountains of the South Island: the Murchison Mountains in Fiordland National Park.
In April 1948 he heard a strange, deep, drawn-out call — "like someone whistling into a .303 cartridge case." Then he found large three-toed tracks that matched the records exactly. On November 20, 1948, his larger search party reached what is now Orbell Lake, at 1,200 meters, ringed by snow peaks. There, standing calmly in golden tussock, was a half-meter bird with metallic blue-green feathers, a huge orange-red beak and strong legs. A living takahē. It showed no fear — only curiosity, the way its ancestors had regarded New Zealand's first Māori arrivals.
The world headline: "Bird extinct for 50 years reappears." New Zealand launched one of the longest-running species recovery programs in the world — breeding centers, hand-rearing techniques, even puppets to feed chicks so they would not imprint on humans. Seventy-five years later, the takahē population has recovered to about 500 birds, and in 2023 they were reintroduced to new habitats. Orbell died in 2007 at 98, having watched the whole recovery with his own eyes.
Wallace's Giant Bee: 38 Years Missing
Imagine a bee with a wingspan over 6 cm, a body 4 cm long, weighing dozens of times more than an ordinary bee. That is Wallace's giant bee — the largest bee on Earth.
In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace — co-founder of evolution by natural selection — found it on Bacan Island, Indonesia, and was stunned by its jaws, which looked like surgical forceps. Locals called it Raja Oatu: the king of bees.
After 1981, nobody saw it alive. Indonesia's rainforests were vanishing for palm plantations and timber. Scientists feared the species was gone.
In January 2019, an expedition to the North Moluccas — led by nature photographer Clay Bolt and entomologist Eli Wyman — found what they were hoping for. Wallace's giant bee nests exclusively inside living tree termite mounds, using its huge mandibles to gather resin and coat the nest walls against the termites. On the last day, on a tall termite mound, Bolt spotted a large dark shape. He thought it was a bird. Then it turned.
"Seeing this 'flying bulldog' was absolutely breathtaking," Bolt said.
Its extreme specialization — breeding only in certain termite nests, living only in certain forests — is exactly what makes it so fragile. The rediscovery bought it time, but only if the forests survive.
The Tree Lobster: 24 Individuals on a Rock
Lord Howe Island, 600 km off Australia's east coast, once hosted an insect nicknamed the tree lobster — the Lord Howe Island stick insect, a giant among its kind.
In 1918, a ship ran aground nearby. The crew was rescued, but the ship's rats escaped onto the island. It was a catastrophe. The stick insects had evolved with no mammalian predators — they had no defenses. By 1920, the last one was gone.
Then, in 2001, an Australian team explored Ball's Pyramid — a 562-meter rock column 20 km away, almost vertical, with almost no soil and no freshwater. Impossible, it seemed, for complex life. But under a small tea-tree thicket growing from cracks, they found fresh droppings of a very large insect. That night, under searchlights, giant insects crawled out of the crevices to feed on the tea tree.
Twenty-four individuals. The entire population. Possibly the rarest insect population on Earth.
Two breeding pairs and some eggs went to Melbourne Zoo, where everything had to be learned from zero — diet, breeding cycle, environment. First generation, then second, then third. Today, more than 9,000 tree lobsters live in zoos and research institutions worldwide.
The Black-Footed Ferret: The 18 That Saved a Species
The American Great Plains once belonged to the black-footed ferret — a small predator that eats prairie dogs for 90% of its diet, living in their burrow systems by day and hunting by night, almost never leaving the underground.
As the West was settled and prairie dogs were poisoned as pests, the ferrets vanished with their prey. In 1937, the species was declared extinct. In 1964, a small population turned up in South Dakota — then died out again from disease and inbreeding. In 1979, extinction was declared a second time.
