While humans continue to expand, replacing woodland and wild areas with cement blocks and concrete, nature continues to battle for survival. From feel-good news stories of animals being rescued to the conservation efforts of the giant panda around the world, there’s been a much greater focus on protecting the helping the natural world in recent years.
While much of the coverage is deservedly doom and gloom, every now and then, we get a bright spark pop up seemingly out of nowhere. Quite fittingly given what was on TV at the time, a species thought to be long extinct has officially emerged, captured on camera, and deemed critically endangered rather than gone forever. It’s a tremendous find and the timing couldn’t be better.
Egg-laying mammal returns as Attenborough captures headlines
The rediscovered animal thought to be extinct is the long-beaked echidna. An exceedingly rare egg-laying mammal, when it was first discovered in 1961, the single damaged specimen was named Zaglossus attenboroughi after the legendary nature documentary presenter, Sir David Attenborough. Collected during the Dutch colonial era in Dutch New Guinea, it’s now 62 years later that Sir David’s echidna has been recorded in the wild, per CBC, within what is now the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesia.
Very timely was the discovery and press release in early November 2023 as it aligned with the new series of Planet Earth. Still narrated by Sir David Attenborough, Planet Earth III took 1,904 days of filming across 134 shoots, spanning six continents and 43 countries within those continents. In the series, the rarest animal filmed has an estimated maximum of 49 individuals left in the wild, the Morona-Santiago harlequin frog, which could possibly be a larger population than that of the rediscovered echidna.
Again, Attenborough captivates the world with stunning footage and recounts of survival in an increasingly tough world. Some cling to the remaining ice of the Arctic, while others, as we detailed here at SWNS, cling to driftwood in urban areas. Beyond real-world documentaries, though, animals continue to take center stage in entertainment. Of the top 20 movies worldwide in 2023 so far, mechanical animals, prehistoric marine megafauna, and superheroes whose powers are drawn from animals all feature. Then, there’s the constant presence of animals in gaming.
Being a scene that attempts to appeal to a broader audience as possible, you’ll often find that wildlife is a big source of inspiration in online casino gaming. A key part of having a diverse game selection that allows for the likes of CasinoReviews to award high scores to worthy sites, different themes, and features continue to be drawn from the natural world. At the top pick casino, you can immediately see Big Bass Splash, Buffalo King Megaways, Flying Hippo, and Mustang Gold among the top games, all of which lean into their animal themes. Still, the biggest single piece of entertainment in this space is almost certainly Planet Zoo.
Picking up where Zoo Tycoon 2 left off, Planet Zoo has been a huge hit for Frontier Developments. The UK studio saw the game eclipse one million sales in less than six months after its November 2019 release. Since then, it has continued to pump out free and paid DLC. On November 5, the studio celebrated the zoo management sim’s fourth anniversary with community challenges and 25 percent off at its official store. In Frontier’s FY23 Financial Results, Planet Zoo was cited alongside Jurassic World Evolution 2 as having “performed especially well,” further signaling the draw of wildlife-centric entertainment – especially that of world-class quality.
Long-beaked echidna joins the ranks of re-emerging animals
Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna’s rediscovery itself was somewhat miraculous. The team from Oxford University had embarked on a four-week expedition to Indonesia, and it wasn’t until that very last day, the very last SD card of recording, per BBC, that the thought-to-be-extinct echidna was confirmed as being alive. On top of the rediscovery, several new species of frogs and insects to science were documented. Still, the long-beaked echidna is the story of the expedition, and now it gets to join a small group of rediscovered animals.
It was only in late August that we were treated to similar headlines emerging from New Zealand. The return of the hefty flightless bird, the takahē, was a long time in the making. Seemingly extinct in 1898, they were rediscovered in 1948 and, in 2023, were reintroduced to a third area in the country. So, the takahē and Sir David’s echidna can join the likes of the Australian night parrot (rediscovered in 2013), coelacanth (1998), and Fernandina Island tortoise (2019).
Rightly, there is an ever-increasing focus on preserving wildlife across media, and with Planet Earth III running in the same month, the re-emergence of the long-beaked echidna couldn’t have been more timely.