When the government of Sri Lanka published the  National Red List of threatened plants in 2020, my eyebrows shot up. We’ve all become accustomed, after all, to the grim news these reports periodically bring us. But here it was, in black and white: 128 species, not having been recorded in surveys conducted during the past century, were assessed as “possibly extinct,” while a further two each were assessed as “extinct” and “extinct in the wild.” This was good news indeed. Just eight years earlier, the 2012 National Red List had assessed fully 177 species as possibly extinct, together with five extinct and two others extinct in the wild. Had 49 extinct species — species no one had recorded in more than a century — really been rediscovered since 2012? Clearly, someone had blundered. Not stopping to put the book down, I called up Siril Wijesundara at the National Institute of Fundamental Studies (NIFS) in Kandy and the chairman of the committee of experts who conducted the assessment. “Siril,” I said, “there’s a mistake in the number of extinct flowering plants in the new Red List.” He laughed. “I thought that would get your attention,” he said. “But there’s no mistake. Himesh has rediscovered three of the officially extinct ones as well.” “What’s Himesh?” I asked, thinking it to be the acronym of the institution that had magically rediscovered these species, which, after all, all previous surveys had missed. “Himesh is an amazing guy,” Wijesundara said. “He spends his life searching…This article was originally published on Mongabay