Trivia / Lost Animals Of The 20th Century

• Portrayed by Different Species: By necessity. To illustrate the lives of the now-extinct species, stock footage of related animals were often used to illustrate how they might have lived. On occasion, the show itself will avert this and show rare images and films of the animals themselves while they were alive, such as in the Thylacine segment.
• Science Marches On:
  • A heartwarming example due to the nature of the series. A few of the animals thought to be extinct in the program were later rediscovered.
    • Specimens of the species which Marion's Tortoise belonged to were re-identified, including a specimen named Jonathan, who is still alive as of 2022. Pure members of the subspecies have been bred and a population of these tortoises were re-released into the wild in 2015, though they had to be relocated not long after.
    • Barbary lions are not genetically distinct from lion populations in India and part of Africa. Descendants of North African lions could still be found in European zoos today. A similar discovery was made about the Caspian and Bali tigers, which belong to existing tiger subspecies.
    • The series mentions a then-unconfirmed sighting of Gilbert's Potoroo in 1994 during its original run. Since then, the sightings have been confirmed, but the threat to the species' existence remains. Only 100 individuals remain today.
    • The Palestinian Painted Frog was rediscovered in 2011.
    • The Ferdinandina Island Giant Tortoise (known in the program as the Narborough Island Giant Tortoise) was rediscovered in 2019 when they found a 50-year old female named Fernanda in the island. In 2022, samples from the one specimen found confirmed her to be the same subspecies as the last specimen found in 1906. While Fernanda remains the only known specimen, her relatively young age brings hope that others of her species might still be alive.
  • One heartbreaking example was the Hispaniolan Nesophont, which the program states to have died out in 1930, but was later thought to have died out well before that. The owl pellet that contained its remains, which was thought to have been fresh, turns out to have been much older than initially thought.