A strikingly handsome emerald-green moth, lost to science for nearly one-and-a-half centuries, has been rediscovered in South Africa by citizen scientists who posted photographs of it online. The moth, Drepanogynis insciata, whose body and wing margins look as though they’ve been stained with red wine, was thought to be extinct. The species hadn’t been recorded since two male specimens were collected near the Western Cape town of Swellendam around 1875. Scientists only knew of the moth from those two faded specimens, which are kept in London’s Natural History Museum. However, according to a recent article in ZooKeys, a dozen separate sightings were recorded in four different locations between 2020 and 2023 and uploaded onto iNaturalist, the citizen science website. They were the first photographs ever taken of live specimens. Male specimens of Drepanogynis insciata have now been observed in the Gondwana Private Nature Reserve on four occasions. Image courtesy of Mikael Englund. When the first of those photographs, taken by Cameron Scott in the Gondwana Private Game Reserve, around 160 kilometers (100 miles) west of Swellendam, was uploaded to the site in September 2020, South African lepidopterist Hermann Staude got a tip-off about his intriguing picture. “I looked, and there it was — insciata — [a] living animal,” Staude told Mongabay. “That was quite an incredible feeling, to all of a sudden see something that you thought might have been extinct.” Staude asked Scott to catch a moth if he saw another, which he did. The specimen was kept in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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