Some species officially bid us farewell this year. They may have long been gone, but following more recent assessments, they’re now formally categorized as extinct on the IUCN Red List, considered the global authority on species’ conservation status. We may never see another individual of these species ever again. Or will we? Slender-billed curlew This grayish-brown migratory waterbird, known to breed in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe, and migrate to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, long evaded detection. The last known photo of the slender-billed curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) was taken in February 1995 on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Since then, researchers suspected it had gone extinct, but only recently did assessments confirm this. “We arguably spent too much time watching the bird’s decline and not enough actually trying to fix things,” Geoff Hilton, conservation scientist at U.K.-based charity Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, previously told Mongabay. Christmas Island shrew The Christmas Island shrew (Crocidura trichura) was once widespread on Australia’s Christmas Island. But in the 20th century, there were just four confirmed records of this tiny mammal: two in 1958, one in 1984, and the last in 1985. The species’ latest conservation assessment concludes it has gone extinct. Researchers say a blood-borne parasite transmitted by accidentally introduced black rats, which wiped out two of the island’s endemic rat species, may have also helped decimate populations of the Christmas Island shrew. Australian mammals Three Australian species of bandicoots — the marl (Perameles myosuros), southeastern striped bandicoot (Perameles notina) and Nullarbor barred…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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