Atlas Obscura

The Walking Sausage Comes Home

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This is Ball’s Pyramid. The world’s largest sea stack, it is taller than the Empire State Building—and all that is left over of a seven-million-year-old volcano. But hidden on its sheer rock walls is something even more amazing than the pyramid itself. 

Just as Lazarus supposedly came back from the dead, science has its own stories of resurrection. “Lazarus taxon” species are believed to be extinct only to re-emerge alive later. The Coelacanth was a fish thought to have been extinct for 66 million years before being caught alive and well in 1938. However no species has as great a tale of resurrection as that of Dryococelus australis, also known as the Lord Howe Island Stick insect, or the Walking Sausage. 

The story of how this 6-inch flightless insect managed to survive and return from the very precipice of extinction is nothing short of miraculous. 

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