Newly Discovered and Extinct Species: A Five-Year Look at Earth's Biodiversity (2021–2026)
Somewhere in a Texas national park in March 2024, a park volunteer named Deb Manley photographed a small, fuzzy, sunflower-like plant she had never seen before and uploaded it to iNaturalist. Within a year it had a scientific name, Ovicula biradiata, and the distinction of being the first new plant genus described from a United States national park in nearly fifty years. Around the same time, on the other side of the world, the IUCN Red List quietly moved a small, mouse-sized mammal called the Christmas Island shrew into a category with no way back: Extinct.
Both of these things are true about the last five years of life on Earth, and they are true at the same time. Between 2021 and 2026, researchers have formally described tens of thousands of species that had never been named before, while conservation bodies and national governments have confirmed the loss of hundreds more that will never be seen again. This article looks at both sides of that ledger using the most recent figures available: what has been found, what has been lost, and what the world's policymakers are, and are not, doing about it.
In this article
How a Species Enters, or Leaves, the Record
Naming a new species is slower than most people assume. A specimen usually has to be collected, compared against everything already known in its group, sometimes sequenced genetically, and then formally described in a peer-reviewed journal before it exists in a scientific sense. The Ocean Census initiative, a global marine-discovery partnership, estimates that this process has historically taken around 13.5 years from the moment a specimen is collected to the moment it is published, though new digital identification tools are cutting that down to weeks in some cases.
Declaring a species extinct is, if anything, a harder standard to meet. The IUCN Red List, the world's most widely used authority on conservation status, will not assign the Extinct category until exhaustive, repeated surveys carried out over years or decades have failed to turn up a single living individual. Government bodies such as the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) apply a similar standard under the Endangered Species Act. That caution cuts both ways: the ivory-billed woodpecker, proposed for delisting due to extinction by the FWS back in September 2021, remains formally under review five years later, after a 2022 preprint and a 2025 field report both claimed fresh evidence that the bird survives in Louisiana. Very few extinctions are announced casually. Almost all of them arrive only after the possibility of hope has been thoroughly exhausted.
New Species Discovered, 2021–2026
Despite, or perhaps because of, the pressures on the natural world, the pace of species discovery has not slowed down. If anything, the last five years suggest it has sped up.
On Land: From Sunflowers to Sea Slugs
The California Academy of Sciences, one of the world's most active taxonomic institutions, described 138 new species in 2024 and a further 72 in 2025, spanning six continents and three oceans. The 2025 list alone included 15 beetles, 12 bush crickets, 11 sea slugs, seven fish, seven plants, six geckos, and a single bird: the Galápagos lava heron, a familiar sight to tourists for decades that DNA analysis only recently revealed to be its own distinct species. "Much of life on Earth remains undocumented and therefore unprotected," said Shannon Bennett, the Academy's chief of science, describing why finds like these matter.
Not every discovery needs a research vessel. London's Natural History Museum described 190 new species in 2024, a list that also includes fossils, among them a clearwing moth first noticed by a schoolgirl, Daisy Cadet, inside her family's home in Port Talbot, Wales, after it hatched from a seed pod her mother had unknowingly carried back from a photography assignment in Guyana. The same year's list included what researchers nicknamed the "vegetarian piranha," named for its resemblance to the Eye of Sauron.
The Greater Mekong: A Discovery Engine in Asia
Few regions produce new species as quickly as the Greater Mekong. A WWF report released in December 2024 documented 234 species, 173 plants, 26 reptiles, 17 amphibians, 15 fish, and three mammals, described across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam in 2023 alone, bringing the region's total since 1997 to 3,623. The finds included a soft-furred hedgehog, a high-altitude crocodile newt, and a snake, Rhabdophis hmongorum, named in honour of the H'mong porters who helped locate it. "Each of these species is a critical piece of a functioning, healthy ecosystem," said Chris Hallam, WWF-Asia Pacific's regional wildlife lead.
For the newt, at least, discovery has come with a safety net. Captive-breeding programmes at Germany's Cologne Zoo and Vietnam's Melinh Station now hold hundreds of individuals of a closely related species, in case wild populations don't hold. "This helps to buy time and prevents the extinction process," said Thomas Ziegler of the Cologne Zoo.
Bangladesh's Own Contributions
Closer to home, Bangladeshi researchers have added steadily to the country's species record. Dhaka University students confirmed a new dragonfly record, Platygomphus dolabratus, from Jamalpur in 2020; a striking orange snake nicknamed "Kamalabati" (Oligodon kheriensis) turned up in a Panchagarh bamboo bush and was formally published by University of Chittagong researchers in 2023; and a newly described jumping spider, Rhene khulnaensis, joined the country's arachnid record the same year. The Bangladesh National Herbarium has been just as active botanically, confirming three new-to-Bangladesh Lythraceae records in 2024 and reporting, in a late-2023 review, four plant species entirely new to science found through the country's herbarium research since 2009.
Discoveries like these remain genuinely rare, which is part of what makes each one worth recording. As Dr Monirul Khan of Jahangirnagar University put it after an earlier mammal survey turned up two previously unrecorded species in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, "Finding any new wildlife species for the country is very rare."
Beneath the Waves: The Ocean Census Era
The ocean remains the least-explored part of the discovery story, and the numbers reflect it. Since its 2023 launch, the Nippon Foundation–Nekton Ocean Census has become the largest coordinated effort to catalogue marine life, announcing 866 new species in March 2025 and a further 1,121 across 13 expeditions between April 2025 and March 2026, a 54 percent increase year over year, achieved with more than 1,400 taxonomists from 660 institutions in 85 countries. Its scientists reached depths of over 6,500 metres, filmed the first confirmed live footage of a juvenile colossal squid, and pulled 30 previously unknown species, including a carnivorous "death-ball" sponge, from the remote South Sandwich Islands. "We are in a race against time to understand and protect ocean life," said Michelle Taylor, the Ocean Census's scientific director. Closer to the American coast, the California Academy of Sciences retrieved reef-monitoring devices off Guam in late 2025 that had sat on the seafloor since 2018, turning up roughly 20 species new to science among 100 previously undocumented in the region.
Just How Many New Species Are There, Really?
A December 2025 study from the University of Arizona, published in Science Advances, put a number on this activity at a global scale for the first time. Analysing the taxonomic history of roughly two million species, the team led by evolutionary biologist John Wiens found that scientists described an average of more than 16,000 new species per year between 2015 and 2020, including over 10,000 animals, 2,500 plants, and 2,000 fungi, and that 15 percent of all species known today were only described in the last two decades. "We're finding new species at a faster rate than ever before," Wiens said, pushing back on the idea that taxonomy is running out of things to name. The same research estimated the current rate of confirmed extinction among already-described species at roughly 10 per year, a discovery-to-extinction ratio of well over a thousand to one, at least among the species we already know about.
Species Confirmed Extinct, 2021–2026
Extinction announcements rarely make for tidy headlines, because they are almost never about something that happened in the year they are announced. Nearly every species on this list disappeared years or decades before anyone formally declared it gone; what changed between 2021 and 2026 is that the paperwork finally caught up with the biology.
- September 2021The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposes removing 23 species from Endangered Species Act protection because they are extinct, the largest such action in the Act's fifty-year history. The list includes the ivory-billed woodpecker, ten other birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish, a fruit bat, and a plant.
- October 2023The Service finalises the delisting of 21 of those species: ten birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish, and the Little Mariana fruit bat. The Hawaiian plant proposal is withdrawn entirely, and the ivory-billed woodpecker is held back for further review. Federal protection, then-Director Martha Williams said, had come too late for these species, calling it "a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it's too late."
- 2024–2025Following a peer-reviewed study, the IUCN Red List confirms the extinction of the Slender-billed Curlew, a wading bird once common across Siberian and Kazakh wetlands and last photographed in Morocco in February 1995. It becomes the first mainland bird species in Europe known to have disappeared from human causes in modern times.
- 2025 Red List updateThe Christmas Island shrew (undone by introduced cats and foxes sometime between the 1920s and 1960s), three Australian bandicoot species appearing on the Red List for the first and last time, a Cuban plant unseen since 1952, a Hawaiian shrub last recorded in the Waianae Mountains in 1937, and a Cape Verdean sea snail not found despite annual surveys through 2024, all move into the Extinct category.
- Five-year totalIUCN data show 310 species reclassified as Extinct over the period this article covers, including 44 in 2025 alone.
Zoom out, and the wider picture becomes clearer. As of the IUCN's October 2025 update, 48,648 species, 28 percent of everything the Red List has assessed, are now classified as threatened with extinction. Some groups are in far more trouble than others.
There are counterpoints worth naming inside this same data set. The 2025 Red List round also noted that global green turtle populations are rebounding thanks to sustained conservation work, and the Iberian lynx, once down to a few dozen animals, has kept recovering since 2024. Extinction is not the whole story even inside the Red List; it is simply the part that draws the least attention when things go right.
The Policies Trying to Keep Pace
Governments have not been silent on any of this, even if the pace of agreement rarely matches the pace of loss.
A Global Framework: Kunming-Montreal and the 30x30 Promise
In December 2022, 188 governments meeting in Montreal adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the successor to the failed Aichi Targets. It sets four overarching goals and 23 specific targets for 2030, the best known of which, Target 3, the "30x30" target, commits countries to protecting at least 30 percent of the planet's land, inland waters, and ocean, and restoring 30 percent of already-degraded ecosystems, by the end of the decade. A companion goal aims to halt human-caused extinction of known threatened species entirely and cut the extinction risk and rate for all species tenfold by 2050.
CBD COP16 and the Money Problem
The framework's first real test came at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in October and November 2024, held under the banner "Peace with Nature." Talks were suspended before delegates could finish, but not before they created the Cali Fund, a mechanism requiring companies that profit from digital genetic-sequence data drawn from nature to contribute to conservation, with at least half of that funding earmarked for Indigenous peoples and local communities. What the summit failed to do was arguably more consequential: it left the framework's target of mobilising 200 billion dollars a year without an agreed strategy, and only around 407 million dollars had been pledged to the interim Global Biodiversity Framework Fund by the time talks broke down, a fraction of what wealthier nations had already promised to deliver by 2025.
CITES CoP20: Wildlife Trade Under Renewed Scrutiny
More recently, from late November into early December 2025, Samarkand, Uzbekistan became the first Central Asian city to host a Conference of the Parties to CITES, the treaty governing international wildlife trade. Roughly 4,600 delegates from 185 Parties considered around 250 species, more than at any previous CITES meeting, and voted to strengthen protections for more than 70 species of sharks and rays, including whale sharks, manta rays, and devil rays, alongside tighter rules on trade in rare reptiles. Uzbekistan and its neighbours also signed the Samarkand Declaration, committing to a joint regional conservation action plan running through 2032.
Bangladesh's Own Legal Momentum
Bangladesh's framework has been moving too, if slowly. The country's core wildlife statute, the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act of 2012, is now being supplemented: draft ordinances circulated in November and December 2025, the Forest and Tree Conservation Ordinance and a revised Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Ordinance, were awaiting gazette notification in early 2026 and are meant to close several gaps in the 2012 law. On 14 January 2026, the Bangladesh Forest Department and IUCN Bangladesh formally launched work on the country's Third National Faunal Red List, aligning the assessment with current IUCN criteria and tying it explicitly to Bangladesh's Kunming-Montreal and CITES obligations. Species-specific national plans are already running for the country's vultures, gharials, elephants, tigers, river dolphins, and sharks and rays, even as a broader twenty-year Wildlife Conservation Master Plan, drafted in 2015, and a National Conservation Strategy that took roughly four decades to finalise for the period 2021 to 2036, still await full implementation.
"The sixth great extinction of plant and animal life" is how primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall described the present moment in her final Earth Day message, in April 2025, months before her death that October.Jane Goodall Institute, Earth Day message, April 2025
What the Research Really Tells Us
It is tempting to read the discovery numbers as good news and the extinction numbers as bad news and leave it there, but the research says something more specific. WWF's 2024 Living Planet Report found a 73 percent average decline in the size of monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020, with freshwater species down 85 percent, terrestrial species down 69 percent, and marine species down 56 percent, based on tracking almost 35,000 populations across 5,495 species. That figure describes population size, not species loss. As the report's own data custodians at the Zoological Society of London have pointed out, it does not mean 73 percent of species have vanished, only that the animals researchers do track are, on average, far less numerous than they were half a century ago. WWF-US president Carter Roberts summed up the report's message plainly: "a wake-up call that we need to get going, and fast."
The more unsettling implication sits underneath the discovery numbers, not the extinction ones. Roughly 90 percent of marine species, and by some estimates more than 80 percent of species overall, remain formally undescribed. Under most conservation law, a species generally has to be named before it can be legally protected, which means an unknown but real number of extinctions are almost certainly happening to organisms science never got the chance to meet. Naming new species, seen this way, is not a separate story from losing old ones. It is the leading edge of the same fight, which is roughly what Sir David Attenborough meant when he said, more simply, that nature is our biggest ally and greatest inspiration.
| Indicator | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| New species described worldwide, average per year (2015–2020) | 16,000+ | Wiens et al., Science Advances, 2025 |
| Species reclassified as Extinct, past five years | 310 | IUCN Red List, 2025 |
| Species currently classified as threatened | 48,648 (28% of assessed) | IUCN Red List, October 2025 |
| Average decline in monitored wildlife population size, 1970–2020 | 73% | WWF Living Planet Report, 2024 |
| Marine species still formally undescribed | ~90% | Ocean Census / The Nippon Foundation |
Frequently Asked Questions
- How many new species are discovered each year?
- A December 2025 University of Arizona study estimated that more than 16,000 new species are formally described worldwide each year, based on data from 2015 to 2020, with insects making up the largest share.
- How many species have gone extinct in the last five years?
- According to IUCN Red List data, 310 species were reclassified as Extinct between roughly 2021 and 2025, including 44 in 2025 alone.
- What is the IUCN Red List?
- It is the world's most widely referenced database of species' conservation status, maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, ranking species from Least Concern to Extinct based on rigorous, repeated scientific assessment.
- Is the ivory-billed woodpecker extinct?
- Its status remains formally unresolved. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed declaring it extinct in 2021 but has not finalised that decision, partly because of disputed evidence suggesting the bird may still survive in Louisiana.
- What is the "30x30" target?
- It is Target 3 of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, committing signatory countries to protect at least 30 percent of the world's land, freshwater, and ocean by 2030.
The Path Ahead
None of this resolves into a tidy conclusion, and it probably should not. The same five years that gave researchers tens of thousands of newly named species also cost the planet hundreds it will never see again, and the policy machinery meant to tip that balance is still, by its own architects' admission, underfunded and behind schedule. What seems clear is that documentation and protection are no longer separate jobs. A species cannot be shielded by any law, Bangladeshi or global, until someone has first done the unglamorous work of proving it exists. For a country updating its own faunal Red List for only the third time in its history, that is not an abstract point. It is the next five years' work.
Sources and Further Reading
- IUCN Red List of Threatened Species – iucnredlist.org
- WWF, Living Planet Report 2024 – worldwildlife.org
- Convention on Biological Diversity, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – cbd.int
- CITES Secretariat, CoP20 summary and outcomes – cites.org
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Endangered Species Program – fws.gov
- California Academy of Sciences, press releases on new species – calacademy.org
- Ocean Census (The Nippon Foundation–Nekton) – oceancensus.org
- Wiens et al., "New species are being discovered faster than ever," Science Advances, 2025, via University of Arizona – tedx.arizona.edu
- IUCN Bangladesh – iucn.org
- WWF, New Species Discoveries in the Greater Mekong 2023 report – worldwildlife.org
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