Horned creature vanished from African wild for years. Then came ‘remarkable comeback’

The grasslands of North Africa once abounded with antelope crowned with blade-like horns. Herds of the hoofed creatures, known as scimitar-horned oryx, could be found as far west as Mauritania and as far east as Egypt.

After a hunting binge in the 1980s, however, their population plummeted, and in 2000, they were officially declared extinct in the wild.

But now, thanks to an “ambitious” rehabilitation program, the oryx have returned to the wild, becoming the first species to be brought back from the brink of extinction due to the initiative, according to a Dec. 11 news release from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

The rewilding effort has been years in the making and is the result of a partnership between the Environment Agency of Abu Dhabi (EAD) and other international groups, including the ZSL.

The initiative required “in-depth, careful preparation,” Tim Wacher, a senior conservation biologist at ZSL, said in the release.

As a result of the global effort, 510 scimitar-horned oryx have been born in the wild of Chad, a landlocked country in central North Africa. The population is now considered self-sustaining.

Researchers at ZSL published a study in February that analyzed 95 plant and animal species that are extinct in the wild but could be rehabilitated by humans. Among the species they identified were a Hawaiian crow, a Wyoming toad and a Chinese deer.

Conservation biologists have demonstrated that lost “species can be recovered, and extinctions in the wild prevented and even reversed,” researchers wrote in the study, published in the journal Science. Past successful repopulation efforts, including of the European bison, indicate it’s possible to stem the increasing rate of extinction.

Up to 2,000 species are estimated to go extinct every year worldwide, which could be 10,000 times higher than the natural average and is largely caused by human behavior, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.

Of the 95 species identified in the study, the scimitar-horned oryx is the first to be successfully returned to the wild.

“At a time when biodiversity is being lost at unprecedented rates,” Andrew Terry, the director of conservation and policy at ZSL, said in the release, “the return of the scimitar horned oryx can give us hope for other species whose fate is — quite literally — in our hands.”