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Despite news about the inexorable continuation of the Sixth Extinction (Leakey & Lewin, 1995), occasional signs of hope appear. In June 2023, researchers at an undisclosed location west of Melbourne, on the ancestral lands of the Wadawurrung people, discovered a population of Victorian Grassland Earless Dragons (Tympanocryptis pinguicolla) thought for more than fifty years to be extinct in Victoria (Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, 2023).

It is significant that a so-called “Lazarus species”(Keith & Burgman, 2004) can be found in Australia, not in a remote location, but in a peri-urban area that regularly comprises the country’s fastest growing municipalities (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2023). More remarkable is that Tympanocryptis inhabits areas of natural temperate grasslands that are subject to degradation and fragmentation by agricultural and urban development …