EXTINCT SPECIES BACK FROM THE DEAD AFTER 100 YEARS. DNA Confirms Amazing Australian Isle
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Date: 2017-10-05

LORD HOWE STICK INSECT: EXTINCT SPECIES BACK FROM THE DEAD AFTER 100 YEARS
An insect that was long taken for dead has been found. The Lord Howe Island stick insect, considered extinct for years, still walks—or crawls—the Earth. 

Hungry rodents diminished their numbers long ago. When rats, stowing away on ships, came to Lord Howe Island, they found a tasty new food source in the Lord Howe Island stick insect. Rats ate so many that scientists believed these creepy crawlies had been eaten completely off the island.

The six-legged animal has never been found anywhere on Earth except for off the coast of New South Wales in Australia. It’s born green, and as an adult, is dark brown and the length of a human palm. Some give this six-legged, flightless creature the endearing nickname of “tree lobster.”

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Scientists have confirmed that giant insects found on a rocky outcrop off Lord Howe Island are a genetic match for the island’s stick insects that were believed to have gone extinct almost 100 years earlier.

The species were assumed to be one and the same. However significant morphological differences between the Lord Howe Island stick insects collected in the early 1900s and stored in museum collections, and the phasmids discovered in 2001 on Ball’s Pyramid (a remnant volcano about 23km off the main island), created a suspicion the latter could be a related species – rather than the original back from the dead.

That suspicion prompted scientists to map the genome from descendants of the Ball’s Pyramid phasmids, which were bred in captivity at Melbourne zoo. They compared it to DNA extracted from museum specimens held by the CSIRO.

Scientists find a Lord Howe Island stick insect that is as big as a hand 100 YEARS after the species was thought to have gone extinct
Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have used genetic analysis to confirm that insects found in the 1960s are the same species as Lord Howe Island