In fact, the ivory bill has been re-discovered in several places now. When I moved out here to where I live in Florida, the bird was listed as not having been seen since the 1960s and probably extinct. However, soon after moving out here I noticed a pair of large woodpeckers at close range --- close enough to verify that they were not cockaded or piliated woodpeckers --- and looked them up on the Cornell ornithology site. Cornell, at that time, had just verified through calls and the knocking noises they make that the Ivory Bill was present in Arkansas. The range did NOT include Florida any longer.Pokemonmaster345 wrote:And I agree with Ravenari on the fact that species have been considered extinct then found. Another example would be the ivory-billed woodpecker. Thought to be extinct since 1944, rediscovered in 2004.
I contacted them with the verification information and a few blurry photos I'd been able to snap (they're incredibly fast and very shy, one reason why the experts may be having problems photographing them clearly). End result: Florida was re-listed as habitat for these birds.
I still see them frequently in my yard and now there are at least two pairs instead of the original one. Even when you don't see or hear direct evidence of the bird, there's other plausible evidence. These guys favor a particular type of diseased tree and leave a distinctive set of holes in them which makes them look like a large termite mound. The dimension and depth of the holes distinguishes them from other woodpeckers' activities and scientists can tell from the wood itself how long the tree has been dead and therefore how long ago the bird was present. Aside from the fact that rotting wood doesn't last long down here, most of the sitings of such trees have had sign on them as recent as a few months.
Florida panthers are yet another animal whose population has benefited from the application of cryptozoological studies. Its original preferred habitat was NOT the swamps in which they now live but a very limited and still disappearing habitat of hammock, dry scrub, and pine unique to north central and central Florida. For years scientists have sworn that the Florida panther population consisted of less than three hundred individuals, all tagged and all tracked and all accounted for in the Everglades area.
Five years ago, someone hit one on a highway north of the county in which I live (which is nowhere near the Everglades). It was verified with DNA to be a Florida panther rather than a hybrid or a released mountain lion (sometimes done in an attempt to put new blood into the Florida panther population). Furthermore, it was an untagged three year old male. The implications of this were staggering because that's a prime breeding male and one which had not been tagged or otherwise noted by scientists. It means that in counties where the last sighting of a Florida panther was nearly one hundred years ago, there is still a viable and undiscovered population in the area.
Incredible, especially when you consider the amount of development in the area and that there just aren't that many truly unsurveyed and untrafficked areas in those counties.
These living cases make it far easier for me to believe that we could have indeed missed something like a Bigfoot or a Florida skunk ape or other cryptids.
