The Leopard Zanzibar Declared Extinct Keeps Being Seen - And No One Can Explain Why

The Leopard Zanzibar Declared Extinct Keeps Being Seen - And No One Can Explain Why In 2018, a camera trap on the island of Unguja in Zanzibar, Tanzania filmed a leopard walking through a forest where the species had been presumed extinct for decades. This is the story of the Zanzibar leopard (Panthera pardus adersi), the island cat that Zanzibaris believed witches kept as familiars and that a state-backed campaign hunted toward oblivion after the 1964 revolution, the scientists Helle Goldman and Martin Walsh who went looking and found nothing, and the contested footage from Animal Planet's Extinct or Alive that reopened the question of whether it was ever really gone. 🐾 Chapters 0:00 Opening 0:54 The island's lost leopard 1:23 Villagers who never agreed 2:11 A leopard for witches 3:23 The campaign to erase it 4:35 Scientists go looking 7:32 A rediscovery in Vietnam 9:25 Built to survive us 10:59 The 2018 footage examined 13:15 What the record forgot Sources (on screen and here, in full): Walsh, M.T. & Goldman, H.V. (2004). The Zanzibar Leopard, Dead or Alive? Tanzanian Affairs. https://www.tzaffairs.org/2004/01/the... Goldman, H.V. & Walsh, M.T. (2002). Is the Zanzibar Leopard (Panthera pardus adersi) Extinct? Journal of East African Natural History 91(1):15. https://bioone.org/journals/journal-o... Walsh, M. (2017). Interview, American Ghost Walks (the witchcraft belief and the post-1964 anti-leopard campaign led by the witch-finder Kitanzi). https://www.americanghostwalks.com/bl... Forrest Galante, Discoveries (the 2018 camera-trap footage, Animal Planet's Extinct or Alive). https://www.forrestgalante.com/discov... Inside Edition (2018). Zanzibar Leopard Captured on Camera, Despite Being Declared Extinct. https://www.insideedition.com/zanziba... Wikipedia, Zanzibar leopard (the contestation: undisclosed locality, unresolved rosette pattern, possible mainland leopard, DNA needed, experts did not endorse the footage). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanziba... Wikipedia, Extinct or Alive (the Animal Planet series that recorded the 2018 footage). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct... Miththapala, S., Seidensticker, J. & O'Brien, S.J. (1996). Phylogeographic Subspecies Recognition in Leopards (Panthera pardus): Molecular Genetic Variation. Conservation Biology 10(4):1115 (the 1996 study that folded the Zanzibar leopard into the mainland African leopard). https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1... Nguyen, A. et al. (2019). Camera-trap evidence that the silver-backed chevrotain (Tragulus versicolor) remains in the wild in Vietnam. Nature Ecology & Evolution. https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155... Re:wild (2019). Found: miniature fanged deer rediscovered tiptoeing through Vietnam's coastal forests. https://www.rewild.org/press/found-ch... Mongabay (2019). Scientists rediscover mammalian oddity in remote Vietnam. https://news.mongabay.com/2019/11/sci... 🎵 Music 'Within Our Nature' by Scott Buckley, released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au The Zanzibar leopard (Panthera pardus adersi) is not globally extinct: leopards as a species thrive across Africa and Asia. What is presumed lost is the small island form on Unguja, Zanzibar, where no scientist has confirmed a living leopard since the early 1980s. The 2018 camera-trap footage is real but was never confirmed by the leading experts as the endemic Zanzibar leopard and could be a mainland African leopard carried to the island; without DNA, its identity remains unresolved.