HN Reader

Unpopular opinion: hundreds of years from now, loss of mammalian species will seem like sentimental naval gazing when our descendants consider the millions of strains of fungi, bacteria, archaea, and viruses we could have saved, were it not for our micro-blindness.

> by 1908 the shrew was thought extinct... Brief rediscoveries in 1958 and 1984 brought fleeting hope

So 2025 might be the 4th time the shrew has been declared extinct.

I thought this was going to an obituary for the resident who got the original goatse.cx taken down.

It's hard to imagine an animal like a shrew weighs only 6 grams.

how could they say with any certainty it is extinct? It is tiny.

> Yet it was not quite gone. Half a century later, in 1958, two shrews appeared as bulldozers tore into the forest for phosphate mining. They were seen, released, and forgotten.

I wonder how many thought-to-be-extinct species were not seen before it was too late. It's also wild that they were simply released instead of being moved to captivity to try to breed