Creatures of the TWILIGHT ZONE

ARE THEY ALIVE OR EXTINCT? NO ONE REALLY KNOWS

- MIKE LOCKLEY Sunday Mercury Writer

SOME of the UK's wildlife loses have been well-documented ~ we know the wolf, lynx and bear are extinct species.

But there are others - many others - whose status remain unknown. Scientists are unsure if they are “goners” or still cling on somewhere. And there are a surprising number that reappear after being officially declared dead.

Here are just a handful of those “Twilight Zone” creature: We don’t know whether they still exist or they have risen from deathbeds.

Perhaps the British public can be forgiven for not caring if the black rat is still with us.

For starters, it’s a rat and we've waged a long, unsuccessful, war on the rodents. It - not the uncomfortably common brown rat - was also declared responsible for spreading the plague.

We never forgave it for that.

Let's be honest, you'd need to bea PR genius to mount a successful “Save The Black Rat” campaign.

Also known as the ship rat, experts are pretty sure the black is no longer a breading species, yet the animal keeps on cropping-up - mostly in dockland locations.

Those, it is believed, got here in the same way the first black rats arrived back in Roman times - by ship.

The People’s Trust for Endangered Species says: “They may be extinct but some transient populations (in Southwark in London, and Avonmouth) may still exist, along with small populations on offshore islands. They may still occur on the Channel Islands of Alderney and Sark.”

No one really has the appetite to find out.

How little we care about the black rat is illustrated by the fact the last known permanent UK population on the Shiant Isles, in the Hebrides, was not preserved, but wiped out. The 2017 cull was carried out because of the toll the rat was taking on nesting seabirds.

Yet the “black” was once very common - that’s why the plague spread so quickly. The arrival of the more robust brown rat in the 18th century heralded its demise.