Nobody Told These Seven Species They Were Supposed to Stay Gone

The Colossal Foundation and Re:Wild just announced the second cohort of projects supported by the world’s only fund dedicated to returning threatened species to the wild.

Extinction is supposed to be the ending nobody edits. Final, filed, done. The Colossal Foundation — the nonprofit arm of the Dallas outfit famous for chasing the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf — and the global wildlife group Re:wild, have spent two years treating that as a dare. This week the dynamic duo named the second class of their Species Reintroduction Fund: seven threatened species across four continents, each one funded to claw its way back into the wild place that lost it.

The vastly unique roster has no business being this cinematic. A banteng—one of Asia’s largest wild cattle, whose population has declined by roughly 80 percent in just 20 years—is airlifted into a Cambodian sanctuary, joining 32 others already relocated there. Brown howler monkeys headed back to a Rio national park where the last one was logged by Charles Darwin himself, in 1832. Black-footed ferrets, where every living survivor descended from just seven animals, bound for a 148,000-acre South Dakota bison ranch.

A dragon-like lizard clinging to the single Guatemalan mountain that is the only place on Earth it exists. And the sunflower sea star — a meter across, two dozen arms — coaxed back to a Pacific seafloor a wasting disease nearly emptied, after erasing an estimated ninety-nine percent of the species from its southern range.

With hundreds of man-hours on the project, it is indeed working. The Sihek — a jewel-bright Guam kingfisher declared extinct in the wild in 1988, after an invasive snake ate its way through the island's forest birds, kept alive for decades only in cages — was released onto a remote, snake-free atoll in 2024. Eighteen months later, all nine birds are alive and have laid the first wild Sihek eggs in a generation. This project is a success, and the Fund is doubling down on it — a second cohort of nine Sihek out this year.

Some of these fights are being waged on two fronts at once. Take the northern quoll, a spotted marsupial predator that Australia's invasive cane toads — introduced in 1935 and lethal to anything that bites one — have been erasing for decades. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy will move up to thirty toad-savvy quolls into a predator-free haven in north Queensland. Meanwhile, Colossal's own labs are trying to edit cane-toad resistance straight into the quoll's genome. "Saving the northern quoll means working on two fronts at once.

Reintroductions like this one give the species safe ground to recover on today, while our research to build cane toad resistance into the quoll’s genome aims to remove the threat that drove its collapse in the first place. Pairing world-class field conservation with genetic rescue is exactly how we believe the fight against extinction should be fought, and the quoll shows how those pieces fit together,” says Dr. Andrew Pask, the company's chief biology officer.

"The fastest way to make extinction a thing of the past is to stop it before it starts," says Matt James, the Foundation's executive director. The field is clearly listening. This cycle, the Fund drew close to $5 million in requests against a $250,000 budget — twenty times what it had to give, and a sign of how many teams are out there with the science done and the habitat ready, waiting on nothing but money. Somewhere on earth tonight, a herd that was one bad season from vanishing is grazing on protected ground. The paperwork said these animals were finished. Re:wild and Colossal are showing that the paperwork can be wrong.