WHAT IS THE WORLDS RAREST ANIMAL?
by Whit Gibbons January 11, 2009 Q. What is the world’s rarest animal? A. This question needs to be qualified if you expect to get anything like consensus from scientists. For example, you might restrict the question to types of animals (such as bird, fish, or frog) or to a location (such as within the United States, or within Alabama, or in the desert). Even then, you are unlikely to get a single answer on which all scientists would agree. Part of the difficulty lies in establishing what is meant by “rare.” Marble salamanders, which 99.44 percent of the people in the southeastern United States have never heard of and even fewer have seen, are not rare in the sense of being scarce. Amphibian biologists know that marble salamanders spend most of their lives in the woods under logs, leaves, rocks, or even underground. They come onto the surface when they breed in the fall, almost always at night when it is raining. To anyone other than an amphibian biologist they would be perceived as ra
