ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the presence of an absence became understood over time as an absence of presence through narrative. Swedish beavers and Tasmanian thylacines had both become rare and then finally unseen, which led some people to claim their extinction. Consensus on the extinction of the beaver was more easily reached than the thylacine, but in both cases, extinction narratives became fixed and paved the way for efforts to reverse the extinctions. Searches for remnant populations of thylacines or ivory-billed woodpeckers, as well as reintroductions and complicated genetic species reconstruction efforts, consume time and resources that possibly could have been reallocated elsewhere if the species was assumed gone forever. The thylacine was eventually declared extinct by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1982 and by the Tasmanian government in 1986 - the absence of presence was officially declared as a presence of absence.
