For a long time scientists believed the coelacanth had died out with the dinosaurs, about 70 million years ago. They knew it only from fossils. Then in December 1938, a South African museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer came across a strange fish that had been caught in a trawl net near the mouth of the Chalumna River. It was five feet long, with steel blue scales and odd, fleshy, limb-like fins. She knew it was something special and wrote to fish expert J.L.B. Smith, who was stunned. It was a living coelacanth. It was hailed as the most sensational natural history discovery of the century. Something everybody had written off as long gone was alive the whole time.
When Mount St. Helens blew in 1980, it flattened about 135 square miles of forest and buried the ground under ash thick enough to bury a car. A couple of years later, scientists tried an odd experiment. They carried a few pocket gophers by helicopter onto the barren pumice and let them loose for about a day. The gophers did what gophers do. They dug, and in digging they churned up the old, rich soil and the helpful fungi buried far below the ash. Then the scientists took them away. Six years later, the fenced plots where the gophers had been were covered with about 40,000 plants, while the patches nearby were still bare.
In the summer of 1988, wildfires burned across huge stretches of Yellowstone. Many people grieved, convinced the park they loved was ruined. Lodgepole pines make up nearly 80 percent of Yellowstone’s forests, and some of their cones are sealed shut with resin. Those cones won’t release their seeds until the resin melts at about 113 degrees Fahrenheit, which usually means a fire. The fire clears away the litter on the forest floor and opens the canopy to sunlight, just what the seedlings need. Decades later those burned slopes are covered with young forests again. The very thing that looked like the end is what released the next generation.
Lord Howe Island, off Australia’s east coast, was once crawling with big, wingless stick insects about six inches long. Then in 1918 a shipwreck brought rats to the island, and the insects disappeared. For decades they were considered extinct. About 10 miles away stands Ball’s Pyramid, a rocky outcrop in the ocean. In 2001, scientists searching it found, in a single bush, three of the long-lost insects and a number of eggs. One scientist said it felt like being transported back to another time. A species everybody had counted as gone had been hanging on in one bush.
The Wollemi pine is so rare that it was thought to be extinct, known only from fossils, until 1994, when a park officer named David Noble rappelled into a narrow canyon in Australia and found trees he didn’t recognize. Only about 200 grow in the wild, all hidden in the canyons of Wollemi National Park. In the terrible bushfires of 2019 and 2020, the flames headed straight for them. A special team of firefighters set up an irrigation system to keep the trees wet, and air tankers dropped fire retardant around the groves. The fire swept through anyway. For days smoke hid everything. When it cleared, a few trees were charred and two had died, but the groves were saved.
