In 2018, Oskar Eustis, who runs the Public Theater, where I advise Shakespeare productions, introduced me to the theater director Kenny Leon. He was hoping to persuade Kenny to direct something for Shakespeare in the Park, and asked me to talk with him. I’m a professor with no acting or directing experience, but I am good at cutting four-hour plays down to size, can explain to actors the difference between thee and you, and have written extensively about Shakespeare’s world. And after a decade or so of advising Royal Shakespeare Company and Public Theater productions, I could tell pretty quickly which directors were great at staging Shakespeare; it turns out surprisingly few.

Kenny was, like me, in his mid-60s. I’m a white guy from Brooklyn; he’s a Black man from the South. I knew him only by reputation: a Tony Award–winning director who had acted, run a couple of theater companies, and done a lot of work on television and Broadway, much of it illuminating Black life in America. We talked about which of Shakespeare’s plays he might find appealing and settled on Much Ado About Nothing, a darkish comedy that could accommodate an African American cast and be set in contemporary Georgia (it helped that the play’s locale, Messina, shared a name with a town not far from Atlanta). After only a couple of days of rehearsals, I could see that Kenny had an unrivaled gift for getting at the essence of Shakespeare. His production was thrilling. Most directors don’t like having a scholar in the room, but Kenny made clear that he enjoyed having me around. And I was learning a lot about the play that could never be picked up from books.

After that run, I saw everything Kenny directed on Broadway—A Soldier’s Play, Topdog/ Underdog, Ohio State Murders—always wondering if he’d return to Shakespeare. So I was thrilled in 2021 when he got in touch and said he was interested in directing Hamlet for a Shakespeare in the Park production. We went to work figuring out how to manage a cut that would allow him to, as Shakespeare put it, show “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” The challenge of making a play first staged in Elizabethan London speak to contemporary Americans was daunting. Watching Kenny direct over the past six weeks, surmounting this challenge, has been among the most gratifying experiences in my career as a Shakespearean. As dress rehearsal approached, I asked Kenny if we could chat while he grabbed a quick dinner in Manhattan’s theater district.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

James Shapiro: I just found an email from you, from February 2021, a month after the attack on the Capitol. And you wrote, “I’m reading Hamlet over breakfast. I do want to do it with an African American cast. Does it make sense to explore this story in a return to the South?” So you’ve been thinking about this play for two years now.

Kenny Leon: Yes. And we indeed set it in Atlanta a year after the start of the pandemic, a little bit after George Floyd’s murder and the racial reawakening. When we spoke, I had also been teaching classes virtually. And I looked into the eyes of the young people, and I saw the fear in them. I saw sadness in them about where our country was, where it was going in terms of politics, religion and almost everything. I realized that this is an opportunity to look at Hamlet through the lens of those students. Can I set this play in 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia, honoring everything that Shakespeare has on the page, only using his words, only substituting original songs that are more contemporary but nothing else? And as I went through that process, I got more and more excited.

Shapiro: And that meant focusing the play on certain of its themes?

Leon: We’re focusing on the relationships. We’re focusing on the domestic part of the play. We’re not focusing on the political, the military part of the play. Because when you get rid of our institutions, our armies and navies, and you get rid of presidents and governors, you’re left with people. People. People make up the military. People make up the government. People. So we focus it down on these people. Now, some of these people may be in positions of power; some may not be not in positions of power. But this is a Hamlet that is, at heart, about people.

Shapiro: There are always going to be those who are purists. A play called Hamlet was staged when Shakespeare came to London in the late 1580s. It wasn’t his Hamlet; it was somebody else’s. I’m sure some Elizabethan purist who came to see Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1600 walked out of the Globe Theatre saying, “I can’t believe he messed with my favorite play. He made all these changes. How dare he tamper with it in that way?” I’m sure there are going to be people who say that about every Hamlet production they see, yours as well.

Leon: I think Shakespeare left a beautiful road map. I haven’t betrayed his road map. So, you know, he says, there’s a funeral. He says Hamlet’s father is dead. Set it in Atlanta, Georgia, so the funeral’s in southwest Atlanta. These people would sing at the funeral. So as people are walking into the Delacorte [the Central Park theater where Shakespeare in the Park is staged] it’s like, a funeral is in progress. I always wanted Solea Pfeiffer to be Ophelia.

John Douglas Thompson, Solea Pfeiffer, Nick Rehberger, and Laughton Royce in The Public’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, directed by Kenny Leon, running at The Delacorte Theater. (Photograph by Joan Marcus).

Shapiro: Because of her voice?

Leon: Because of her voice, and because of her look. It was important to me to have Hamlet’s side of the family be Black and Polonius’s side of the family be white or mixed race. That was important, to just get that race dynamic in there. And I knew I needed an Ophelia who could sing, because I know she has those two or three songs in there. And in other productions, I think people get bored or irritated by those songs. So I wanted to establish that Ophelia had a beautiful voice, almost like she’s a singer. And then you fall in love with her, and you feel that love for her early on. So then when we lose her, it means something. I wanted to give the women in the play a little more visible strength than in the past. So you have Lorraine Toussaint as Gertrude, playing it like Michelle Obama. And you have Solea, who has a beautiful singing voice. It gives them a little more strength and gives them a little bite to push back on the men.

Shapiro: You know, there’s somebody who’s not credited in the playbill who figured in a lot of moments, crucial moments, in your rehearsals: Leroy. I was hoping you might give him some credit here.

Leon: Yeah, I have a term, I introduced it … My biological father, Leroy, died about three years ago, and he is a guy who never left Tallahassee, Florida, until a year before he passed. You know, he’s a real basic guy. He’s the type of guy that would go into a New York restaurant and say, “Where the food at, boy? Where’s the food?” So I introduced that to the actors early on and said, “I want a play that Leroy could understand. Someone who’s never been to a play, someone who is an Everyman, and they want to be fed the things that theater has to offer.” We just have to, like you said, get to Shakespeare and lose the Shakespearean. So whenever I shout out the word Leroy! in rehearsals, that means I cannot understand what you’re talking about; I don’t know what you mean. So we have to get clear, make it clear for Leroy. So this is a Shakespeare that we’re trying to make clear for Leroy, a country guy who grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, with outdoor plumbing.

[Read: Shakespeare wrote insightfully about women. That doesn’t mean he was one.]

Shapiro: You know, at one point, I heard you ask the actors to “let the culture in.” What did you mean by that?

Leon: I’m always reminded of something August Wilson taught me: It’s that you have to be specific with the story you’re telling, especially culturally. And the more specific you are with the people in the play—who they are, where they come from, what they eat, how they do their hair, what music they listen to—the more specific you are, the better opportunity you have of saying something powerful and impactful and universal for everybody that comes to the Delacorte. So that’s what it’s about. To me, it’s not about reaching Black people or white people or intellectuals or nonintellectuals or theater folks. It’s about reaching human beings, reaching people. And I think by making this specific to Atlanta, Georgia, without changing the words—making the music specific, making the food specific, making their hair specific—we can do that.

Shapiro: John Douglas Thompson, who plays Claudius, told me that he was really struck by how this production is about community rather than Hamlet as an individual. Does that resonate with you?

Leon: Well that’s also because of the cut that you helped me with. It focused on the community, the relationships, the people. So once you focus on the people and you carve around that, it really helps—for one thing, because there’s no way a modern audience is going to sit for a five-hour production.

Shapiro: Well, I hope not, although sometimes they’re forced to. Now, you told me what you needed, and I was the butcher and happy to give you the cut you needed. It was easy because you decided that all this Polish, English, Norwegian, Danish stuff—the European geopolitical parts of the play—didn’t fit the Atlanta story. And once that was gone, we got it down closer to two and a half hours than four-hours plus. And again, it’s all Shakespeare’s language—except for the songs, which, as in Shakespeare’s day, including in Macbeth and Twelfth Night, could be swapped out for newer ones. It seems to me that you’ve been able to bring in more of a cultural story as a result. For example, the Black community’s experience of mourning, of burial, of responding to the dead, of ancestors and their presence in one’s life is particularly striking, and was a revelation for me with my Brooklyn, white, Jewish upbringing. Can you talk about the Ghost a little bit in the context of that?

Leon: The Ghost? Yeah. The Ghost is actually very familiar to my culture. I grew up Black, southern, Christian, but, you know, my culture has a different relationship with the spiritual world. Even if you go to see horror movies we’ve got a different sense of horror movies. We don’t trip down, running away from the monster. Man, we keep going. Or we’re not going to leave the woman in the car, if we think there’s a possibility of a ghost showing up. If you go back to the Caribbean and the African traditions, you can find our relationship to the dead. When Hamlet sees the Ghost, we don’t know if he actually sees it or if the ghost is in him or the ghost is part of him. But we do know that he believes that he is seeing a ghost. And at some point, the Ghost possesses him physically. And I think we pull that off. I think we did a pretty good job of that. But that’s also a culturally specific element that we’re bringing to the show.

Shapiro: Part of that specificity comes through in your choice of Hamlet, Ato Blankson-Wood. I’m just curious, is Ato the Hamlet that was in your head when you cast him?

[Read: Shakespeare write his best works during the plague]

Leon: You know, when I first met Ato—I ran into him last summer—I was consulting on a project that he and some young people were doing about racial awakening, and he took that “to be or not to be” speech, and he personalized it and made it appropriate for what young Black men were going through in America after George Floyd’s death. And so I knew that was the right quality for our Hamlet. And I sort of felt he could deliver that. And now, after working with him, I think it’s a generational performance. No one has quite found the love in that character like Ato has. No one has found the scary part. One of the things we wanted to explore was that idea and definition of what mental health is in our lives today. And he’s embraced that. It’s a scary emotional journey that he’s taking us through. And I just think that it’s a performance of a lifetime. And I couldn’t ask for a better defining moment for that character.

Shapiro: You know, it’s also a defining moment for Hamlet, all these years after its creation, that it could feel so intended for what he does with it, that there’s no tension between the words he’s saying and the character he’s bringing to the role.

Leon: There was one thing Ato asked me when we first started rehearsing: He said, “Can I bring all of me into this Hamlet?” I said, “Yes.” And I feel that it’s a three-dimensional character with a soul and a spirit and a mind and a future. It actually feels like a brand-new play. It feels like a character I’ve never met before.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Maya Chung, an associate editor on the Books team and a frequent contributor to our Books Briefing newsletter. Lately, Maya has been enjoying the style and ambience of the French novelist Maylis de Kerangal, is still thinking about a recent exhibition of work by the surrealist 20th-century artist Meret Oppenheim, and is enjoying post-hype-cycle prestige TV, which includes the fourth and final season of Succession.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

A star reporter’s break with reality The instant pot failed because it was a good product. The fake poor bride

The Culture Survey: Maya Chung

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I really hope to see the Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet in New York’s Central Park this summer. The early pandemic made me realize how much I’d taken for granted living in a city with such incredible theater, so I’ve been cherishing the experience of seeing live theater this past year. And there’s nothing like Shakespeare in the Park—whatever the play, it’s a totally enchanting experience. This year it’s a contemporary Hamlet directed by the celebrated Kenny Leon, who also did this season’s Tony-winning revival of Topdog/Underdog on Broadway. Setting Shakespeare in the modern day can sometimes be gimmicky, but when it’s done right, it captures the magic of his work, and how enduring it remains. [Related: All of Shakespeare’s plays are about race.]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I don’t love watching shows when they’re at the height of their popularity, because when there’s a ton of chatter, I have a hard time figuring out what my actual, original thoughts are (and if I have any!). So I just finally started watching the fourth season of Succession. Avoiding spoilers while working on the Culture desk here has been nearly impossible, and some of the big bombshells did slip through. But I’m still savoring all of the delicious drama and insult-hurling. [Related: The Succession plot that explained the whole series]

I’m even more behind on The Handmaid’s Tale, which I also just started watching a couple weekends ago. The show came out in 2017, which wasn’t that long ago, but it has been really fascinating to watch it with a little bit of distance, especially given the political climate in which it premiered. Also, the performances are spectacular, and it’s visually gorgeous. [Related: The visceral, woman-centric horror of The Handmaid’s Tale]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I read Maylis de Kerangal’s short novella Eastbound earlier this year, which is about a young Russian conscript who, once aboard the Trans-Siberian rail, decides to desert and meets a French woman who helps him. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I then read de Kerangal’s book The Heart, a similarly tense novel about the events and characters involved in a heart transplant—including the young man who dies in an accident, the woman who receives his heart, and the doctors and bureaucrats who make the transplant possible. In recent years I’ve sought out books for style and ambience rather than plot, perhaps because of my fickle attention span or perhaps after reading one too many plodding books. But de Kerangal reminded me how transportive it is when an author successfully creates that itching desire to know what happens next—without forgoing an ounce of style.

As for nonfiction, I’ve loved Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, a book of fragmentary “notes”—which include memoir, theory, photos, and poetic musings—about Black life in America. I’ve been reading the book in blips and spurts over the past couple of months, which in some ways has felt like the best way to read it, because it’s meant I’ve been carrying Sharpe’s intelligent, lyrical voice around with me.

An author I will read anything by: For a long time I didn’t have an answer to this, but as a books editor, you get asked this, or a version of this question, a lot. Though my answer will likely change, right now, it’s Rachel Cusk and Rachel Ingalls. Two very different writers, both completely enrapturing and honest and intricate. [Related: Rachel Cusk won’t stay still.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I loved seeing Meret Oppenheim’s work at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year. I was previously uninitiated in her work but came away from the show entranced by her bleakness and her whimsy. My favorite part came near the end, where, across opposite walls on large sheets of paper, Oppenheim had made a blueprint for a retrospective of her work in Bern. For this, she drew tiny reproductions of her works so that the curators could see what order they should be displayed in. It made me strangely sad to see the artist’s career captured two-dimensionally, in such miniature. But that’s probably the wrong way to look at it; it’s likely that Oppenheim was proudly looking back at her life’s work, taking control of how exactly it should be consumed.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Even the title of Nicole Holofcener’s new movie, You Hurt My Feelings, made me snort—I love a literal title. (When I encountered the similarly prosaic book title Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in this lovely profile of his son, the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy.) In the movie, a woman falls apart when she overhears her husband admitting that he doesn’t like her new book. I’m an editor, not a writer, so I was able to laugh heartily at this premise. But I could imagine that for my writer colleagues, this one might hit a little too close to home. [Related: You Hurt My Feelings is a hilarious anxiety spiral.]

The Week Ahead

Season 2 of The Bear (all episodes streaming on Hulu on Thursday) I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Lorrie Moore’s strange new novel, full of death but also the author’s trademark humor (on sale Tuesday) Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new film that shows the director at his best, according to our critic (in theaters everywhere Friday)

More in Culture

Long live the delightfully dumb comedy. Paul McCartney: I saw you standing there. Killer Mike’s critique of wokeness Asteroid City is Wes Anderson at his best. What to read when you’re feeling ambitious What’s so funny about dying?

Catch up on The Atlantic

Jack Smith’s backup option Why Trump might just roll to the presidential nomination The pregnancy risk that doctor’s won’t mention

Photo Album

Stunning Cephalopod: Aquatic Life Finalist. The iridescent symmetry of this blanket octopus plays a key role in the cephalopod’s success as a predator. Four species of blanket octopuses roam tropical and subtropical seas—including the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Mediterranean—searching for fish and crustaceans to eat.

Scroll through winners of the 2023 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Phil Martin performed with Fender and AC/DC's Brian Johnson at a sold out St James' Park.

Harvesting wild local produce in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park may not seem like the best idea. And yet, on a foraging tour of the lively public park last month, a straw-hatted forager named “Wildman” Steve Brill and his teenage daughter, Violet, led roughly 40 of us amateurs into the grassy areas beyond the park’s paved footpaths for a four-hour tromp. Among plastic wrappers and bottle caps we found edible roots, fragrant herbs, and sturdy greens, all ripe for experimentation in the adventurous cook’s kitchen.

At least in theory. There was food here, for sure, but hardly of the practical variety. We recovered fallen pods from the Kentucky coffeetree, whose seeds can be used to brew a caffeine-free alternative to a morning cup. That is, if one is willing to harvest enough of them, wash them of green toxic goo, and roast them for hours—though even then, it won’t really be coffee. I stuffed a few pods in a canvas bag alongside sassafras root, once used to make root beer the old-fashioned way, and a handful of lettuce-flavored violet leaves that could, in the right quantities, constitute a small salad. Two weeks later, I’m still wondering what, if anything, I’ll actually make with these odd new ingredients.

What I didn’t anticipate were all the medicinal plants. Just a few minutes into the tour, we came across enough wild analgesics and anti-inflammatories to insure a casual hike. Here among the cigarette butts was broadleaf plantain, an easy-to-miss herb (unrelated to the bananalike fruit) known for calming mosquito bites. Over near the urinating puppy was jewelweed, which soothes poison-ivy and stinging-nettle rashes. Twigs snapped from a black birch tree exuded wintergreen oil, also known as methyl salicylate, a relative of aspirin that powers pain-killing ointments such as Bengay and Icy Hot.

Interest in foraging for food has taken off in recent years, owing in part to the gourmet-ification of eating locally and in part to its popularity on social media, where influencers make chips out of stinging nettles and add fir needles to granitas. Foraged ramps and morel mushrooms have become so well known that they now appear on restaurant menus and in high-end grocery stores. But the foraging boom has largely left behind what has historically been a big draw of scrounging for plants—finding treatments for minor ailments. To be clear, medicinal plants aren’t likely to save the casual forager’s life, and they lack the robust clinical data that back up pharmaceuticals. But even some scientists believe they can be handy in a pinch. In a way, being able to find a jewelweed stem is more useful than identifying a handful of leaves that can substitute for lettuce.

That has definitely been the case for Marla Emery, a scientific adviser to the Norwegian Institute for Natural Research and a former research geographer for the U.S. Forest Service who studies community foraging. Several years ago, when huge, oozing blisters formed on her legs after a run-in with poison ivy on a hunting trip, Emery visited an herbalist in Scotland who applied lobelia, an herb with pale-violet flowers, and slippery elm, a tree with mucilaginous properties, to her calf. Soon, she felt a tingling sensation—“as if someone had poured seltzer over the area”—and within an hour the blisters had healed, Emery told me.

Both plants, traditionally used to treat skin conditions, “are supportive of health and have medicinal value,” she said, and they’re especially useful because “you’re highly unlikely to poison yourself” with them. Such anecdotes illustrating the profound utility of medicinal plants are common among botanist types. “If you get a cut and put [broadleaf] plantain on it, you can see it close up,” Alex McAlvay, an ethnobotanist at the New York Botanical Garden, told me. At least for some species, he said, “the proof is in the pudding.”

Though foraging has long been a medicinal practice, and so many modern drugs are derived from plants, in the West, medicinal flora has largely been relegated to “traditional” or “folk remedy” status. Still, their use lives on in many communities, including immigrant groups that “come with medicinal-plant uses from their homelands and seek to continue them,” Emery said. People in Chinese, Russian, and certain Latin communities in the U.S. commonly forage dandelion, a weed with diuretic properties, to support kidney and urinary-tract health, she added.

Along the concrete footpaths of Prospect Park, the Brills pointed out stands of burdock; its roots, in addition to being a tasty potato dupe, are used in some cultures to detoxify the body. Pineapple weed, found in baseball diamonds and sidewalk cracks, can calm an upset stomach, Steve told me later. Scientific data for such claims are scant, much like they are for other foraged plants, and using the plants for health inevitably raises questions about scientific credibility. Many medicinal plants that a casual forager will encounter in the wild will not have been studied through rigorous clinical trials in the same way that any prescription drug has been. Whether people ultimately embrace foraging for medicinal plants depends on how they believe “we make evidence and truth,” McAlvay said. “A lot of people are like, ‘If there’s no clinical research, it’s not legit.’ Other people are like, ‘My grandma did it; it’s legit.’” Nothing beats clinical research, though clearly some plants share valuable properties with certain drugs. Lamb’s quarters, a dupe for spinach, is so packed with vitamin C that it was traditionally used to prevent scurvy; stinging nettle, traditionally used for urination issues, may have similar effects as finasteride, a prostate medication.

Naturally, the experts I spoke with unanimously recommended using foraged medicinal plants only for minor ailments. Just as foraging for food comes with some risks—what looks like a delicious mushroom can make you sick—the same is true of medicinal foraging. Take established, reputable classes and use books and apps to correctly identify plants, many of which have dangerous look-alikes; the edible angelica plant, for example, is easily confused with poisonous water hemlock, of Socrates-killing notoriety. Learning about dosage is important too. A benign plant can become poisonous if too large a dose is used, warned Emery. When working with medicinal plants, she said, “you’ve got to know what you’re doing, and that doesn’t lend itself to the casual TikTok post.” Beginner foragers should stick to “gentle but definitely powerful, easy-to-identify herbs,” such as dandelion and violet, said McAlvay.

As the Brills instructed, when I got home I submerged a foraged jewelweed stem in witch hazel to make a soothing skin tincture. Days later, when I dabbed some onto a patch of sunburn on my arm, I felt, or maybe imagined, a wave of relief. Whatever the case, my delight was real. When I had asked both tour-goers and experts why foraged medical plants mattered in a world where drugs that accomplish the same things could be easily bought at a pharmacy, some said it was “empowering” or “satisfying,” but the description that resonated with me most came from McAlvay, who called it “magic”: the power to wield nature, in nature, in order to heal.

When I got home from the tour and opened my bag of foraged goods, I found a black birch twig, still redolent of wintergreen. Coincidentally, that is the one smell I have craved throughout 38 weeks (and counting) of pregnancy, but moms-to-be are advised to avoid the medicinal ointments containing the oil. I sniffed the twig deeply, again and again, recalling that it might become useful in the months to come. When teething infants are given black birch twigs to chew, the gently analgesic qualities of the low-dose wintergreen oil helps soothe their pain, Brill had said. All of a sudden, their crying stops. What’s more magical than that?

This article was originally published in Undark Magazine.

It could have been a scene from Jurassic Park: 10 golden lumps of hardened resin, each encasing insects. But these weren’t from the age of the dinosaurs; these younger resins were formed in eastern Africa within the past few hundreds or thousands of years. Still, they offered a glimpse into a lost past: the dry evergreen forests of coastal Tanzania.

An international team of scientists recently took a close look at the lumps, which had first been collected more than a century ago by resin traders and then housed at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, in Germany. Many of the insects encased within them were stingless bees, tropical pollinators that can get stuck in the sticky substance while gathering it to construct nests. Three of the species still live in Africa, but two had such a unique combination of features that, last year, the scientists reported them to be new to science: Axestotrigona kitingae and Hypotrigona kleineri.

Species discoveries can be joyous occasions, but not in this case. Eastern African forests have nearly disappeared in the past century, and neither bee species has been spotted in surveys conducted in the area since the 1990s, notes the entomologist Michael Engel, a co-author of the discovery paper who recently moved from a position at the University of Kansas to the American Museum of Natural History. Given that these social bees are usually abundant, the people looking for insects likely hadn’t simply missed them. Sometime in the past 50 to 60 years, Engel suspects, the bees vanished along with their habitat.

“It seems trivial on a planet with millions of species to sit back and go, ‘Okay, well, you documented two stingless bees that were lost,’” Engel says. “But it’s really far more troubling than that,” he adds, because scientists are recognizing more and more that extinction is “a very common phenomenon.”

The stingless bees are part of an overlooked but growing trend of species that are already deemed extinct by the time they’re discovered. Scientists have identified new species of bats, birds, beetles, fish, frogs, snails, lichen, marsh plants, and wildflowers by studying old museum specimens, only to find that they are at risk of vanishing or may not exist in the wild anymore. Such discoveries illustrate how little is still known about Earth’s biodiversity and the mounting scale of extinctions. They also hint at the silent extinctions among species that haven’t yet been described—what scientists call “dark extinctions.”

[Read: Conservation tends to ignore the most common type of life]

Identifying undescribed species and the threats they face is crucial, says Martin Cheek, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom, because if experts and policy makers don’t know an endangered species exists, they can’t take action to preserve it. With no way to count how many undescribed species are going extinct, researchers also risk underestimating the scale of human-caused extinctions—including the loss of ecologically vital species such as pollinators. And if species go extinct unnoticed, scientists also miss the chance to capture the complete richness of life on Earth for future generations. “I think we want to have a full assessment of humans’ impact on nature,” says Ryan Chisholm, a theoretical ecologist at the National University of Singapore. “And to do that, we need to take account of these dark extinctions as well as the extinctions that we know about.”

Many scientists agree that humans have pushed extinctions higher than the natural rate of species turnover, but nobody knows the exact toll. In the tens of millions of years before humans came along, scientists estimate that for every 10,000 species, from 0.1 to 2 went extinct each century. (Even these rates are uncertain because many species didn’t leave behind fossils.) Some studies suggest that extinction rates picked up at least in the past 10,000 years as humans expanded across the globe, hunting large mammals along the way.

Islands were particularly hard-hit, for instance in the Pacific, where Polynesian settlers introduced pigs and rats that wiped out native species. Then, starting in the 16th century, contact with European explorers caused additional extinctions in many places by intensifying habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species—issues that continued in a number of places that became colonies. But again, scientists have a poor record of biodiversity during this time; some species’ extinctions were recognized only much later.

Key drivers of extinction, such as industrialization, have ramped up ever since. For the past century, some scientists have estimated an average of 200 extinctions per 10,000 species—levels so high that they believe they portend a mass extinction, a term reserved for geological events on the scale of the ordeal that annihilated the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Yet some scientists, including the authors of those estimates, caution that even these numbers are conservative. The figures are based on the Red List, compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a bookkeeper of species and their conservation statuses. As several experts have noted, the organization is slow to declare species extinct, wary that if the classification is wrong, they may cause threatened species to lose protections.

The Red List doesn’t include undescribed species, which some estimate could account for roughly 86 percent of the possibly 8.7 million species on Earth. That’s partly because of the sheer numbers of the largest species groups, such as invertebrates, plants, and fungi, especially in the little-explored regions around the tropics. It’s also because the number of experts to describe them is dwindling, thanks to a widespread lack of funding and training, notes Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, a conservation ecologist at UC Santa Cruz. Ocampo-Peñuela told Undark that she has no doubt that many species are going extinct without anyone noticing. “I think it is a phenomenon that will continue to happen and that it maybe has happened a lot more than we realize,” she said.

Studies of animal and plant specimens in museum and herbaria collections can uncover some of these dark extinctions. This can happen when scientists take a closer look at or conduct DNA analysis on specimens believed to represent known species and realize that these have actually been mislabeled, and instead represent new species that haven’t been seen in the wild in decades. Such a case unfolded recently for the ichthyologist Wilson Costa of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who has long studied the diversity of killifish inhabiting southeastern Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. These fish live in shady, tea-colored acidic pools that form during the rainy season and lay eggs that survive through the dry period. These fragile conditions make these species extremely vulnerable to changes in water supply or deforestation, Costa wrote to Undark via email.

In 2019, Costa discovered that certain fish specimens collected in the 1980s weren’t members of Leptopanchax splendens, as previously believed, but actually represented a new species, which he called Leptopanchax sanguineus. With a few differences, both fish sport alternating red and metallic-blue stripes on their flanks. Whereas Leptopanchax splendens is critically endangered, Leptopanchax sanguineus hasn’t been spotted at all since its last collection, in 1987. Pools no longer form where it was first found, probably because a nearby breeding facility for ornamental fish has diverted the water supply, said Costa, who has already witnessed the extinctions of several killifish species. “In the case discussed here, it was particularly sad because it is a species with unique characteristics and unusual beauty,” he added, “the product of millions of years of evolution stupidly interrupted.”

Similar discoveries have come from undescribed specimens, which exist in troves for diverse and poorly studied groups of species, such as the land snails that have evolved across Pacific Islands. The mollusk specialist Alan Solem estimated in 1990 that, of roughly 200 Hawaiian species of one snail family, the Endodontidae, in Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, fewer than 40 had been described, the University of Hawaii biologist Robert Cowie told me. All but a few are now likely extinct, Cowie said, perhaps because invasive ants feasted off the snails’ eggs, which this snail family carries in a cavity underneath their shell. Meanwhile, Cheek told me he’s publishing more and more new plant species from undescribed herbaria specimens that are likely already extinct in the wild.

Sometimes, though, identifying species based on individual specimens is hard, notes Naomi Fraga, a botanist who directs conservation programs at the California Botanic Garden. And describing new species is not always a research priority. Studies that report new species aren’t widely cited by other scientists, and they typically also don’t help toward pulling in new funding, both of which are key to academic success, Cheek said. One 2012 study concluded that a collected species takes an average of 21 years to be formally described in the scientific literature. The authors added that if these difficulties—and the general dearth of taxonomists—persist, experts will continue to find extinct species in museum collections, “just as astronomers observe stars that vanished thousands of years ago.”

Museum records may represent only a fraction of undescribed species, causing some scientists to worry that many species could disappear unnoticed. For some groups, such as snails, this is less likely, as extinct species may leave behind a shell that serves as a record of their existence even if collectors weren’t around to collect live specimens, Cowie noted. For instance, this allowed scientists to identify nine new and already extinct species of helicinid land snails by combing the Gambier Islands in the Pacific for empty shells and combining these with specimens that existed in museums. However, Cowie is concerned about the many invertebrates, such as insects and spiders, that won’t leave behind long-lasting physical remains. “What I worry about is that all this squishy biodiversity will just vanish without leaving a trace, and we’ll never know existed,” Cowie said.

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Even some species that are found while they are still alive are already on the brink. In fact, research suggests that newly described species might have a higher risk of going extinct. Many new species are only now being discovered, because they’re rare, isolated, or both—factors that also make them easier to wipe out, Fraga, of the California Botanic Garden, says. In 2018 in Guinea, for instance, Denise Molmou, a botanist at the National Herbarium of Guinea, discovered a new plant species that, like many of its relatives, appeared to inhabit a single waterfall, enveloping rocks amid the bubbly, air-rich water. Molmou was the last known person to see it alive.

Just before Molmou’s team published their findings in the Kew Bulletin last year, Cheek looked at the waterfall’s location on Google Earth. A reservoir, created by a hydroelectric dam downriver, had flooded the waterfall, surely drowning any plants there, Cheek said. “Had we not got in there, and Denise had not gotten that specimen, we would not know that that species existed,” he added. “I felt sick. I felt, you know, it’s hopeless, like what’s the point?” Even if the team had known at the time of discovery that the dam was going to wipe it out, Cheek said, “it’d be quite difficult to do anything about it.”

Although extinction is likely for many of these cases, it’s typically hard to prove. The IUCN requires targeted searches to declare an extinction—something that Costa is still planning on doing for the killifish, four years after its discovery. But these surveys cost money and aren’t always possible.

Meanwhile, some scientists have turned to computational techniques to estimate the scale of dark extinction by extrapolating rates of species discovery and extinctions among known species. When Ryan Chisholm’s group applied this method to the roughly 195 species of birds in Singapore, they estimated that 9.6 undescribed species have vanished from the area in the past 200 years, in addition to the disappearance of 58 known species. For butterflies in Singapore, accounting for dark extinction nearly doubled the extinction toll of 132 known species.

Using similar approaches, a different research team estimated that the proportion of dark extinctions could account for up to just over a half of all extinctions, depending on the region and species group. Still, “the main challenge in estimating dark extinction is that it is exactly that: an estimate. We can never be sure,” notes Quentin Cronk, a botanist of the University of British Columbia who has produced similar estimates.

Considering the current trends, some scientists doubt whether naming all species before they go extinct is even possible. To Cowie, who expressed little optimism that extinctions will abate, the priority should be collecting species, especially invertebrates, from the wild so there will at least be museum specimens to mark their existence. “It’s sort of doing a disservice to our descendants if we let everything just vanish such that 200 years from now, nobody would know the biodiversity—the true biodiversity—that had evolved in the Amazon, for instance,” he said. “I want to know what lives and lived on this Earth,” he continued. “And it’s not just dinosaurs and mammoths and what have you; it’s all these little things that make the world go ’round.”

Other scientists, such as Fraga, find hope in the fact that the presumption of extinction is just that—a presumption. As long as there’s still habitat, there’s a slim chance that species deemed extinct can be rediscovered and returned to healthy populations. In 2021, Japanese scientists stumbled across the fairy lantern Thismia kobensis, a fleshy orange flower known from only a single specimen collected in 1992. Now efforts are under way to protect its location and cultivate specimens for conservation.

Fraga is tracking down reported sightings of a monkeyflower species she identified in herbaria specimens: Erythranthe marmorata, which has bright yellow petals with red spots. Ultimately, she said, species are not just names. They are participants of ecological networks, upon which many other species, including humans, depend.

“We don’t want museum specimens,” she says. “We want to have thriving ecosystems and habitats. And in order to do that, we need to make sure that these species are thriving in populations in their ecological context, not just living in a museum.”