India, Oct. 23 -- When most people hear "rare animal," they think of tigers or pandas. But one of the rarest breeds of cattle in the world began as a small herd of farm animals that were just left behind. According to a 2022 paper by Michael Trotter and Michael Willis in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology on the history of livestock on the Auckland Islands, that is what happened. The paper also shows how in 1993 a handful of determined people saved the last survivors.

The Auckland Islands lie in the cold subantarctic waters south of New Zealand's South Island. Cattle were introduced to the islands in 1850 for a short-lived settlement, but they do not seem to have survived. The herd in this story came later. Records show that on 4 May 189...