The Javan tiger: the new one "Undead" of evolution

Cairo: Mai Kamal El-Din

Hervé Poirier, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon, tells us that we saw the Java tiger again, although officially extinct.

franceinfo: What happened? This Java tiger hasn’t actually completely disappeared?

Hervé Poirier: Officially, this subspecies of tiger was declared extinct 21 years ago by the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Except that genetic analysis of a hair, found in 2019 on a fence, supported by eyewitness testimony, suggests not.

Compared with the DNA of a specimen preserved in a museum and with other tiger DNA – there are nine known subspecies – the Javan tiger is probably not extinct. He appears to be what biologists call a “Lazarus species”, named after this biblical character who, at the call of Jesus, emerges alive from his tomb.

And there are a lot of cases like that?