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. “It was very exciting to pin down an animal that we not only believed to be extinct but that also has an almost mythical quality, because the furs we have in Mexico are not as precise as we would like since they were not taken by a mammalogist but donated by campesinos [small-scale farmers],” says Almazán-Catalán, president of the Institute for the Management and Conservation of Biodiversity (INMACOB), a Mexican NGO. “We really weren’t sure this rabbit existed. It could’ve been an…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via this RSS feed