“It couldn’t be”: The un-extinction of the Mendocino bush-mallow

UKIAH, CA, 3/12/23 — While out on a walk near Lake Mendocino one night in 2016, Jim Xerogeanes had no idea that his dog taking off after a deer would lead him to find a Mendocino County plant that hadn’t been seen since 1939. A few years later, that plant would no longer be presumed extinct, following the PhD work of a fellow California botanist. 

“I look at my feet and I’m going, ‘I haven’t seen that before,’” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe it was [another species] that was accidentally planted or something.’ I thought it couldn’t be the one that was presumed extinct. And so I sat on it for a few years.”