In a new study published in Nature Plants, an international team of botanists reveals that, indeed, it did not happen. The researchers—who spent years of scouring natural history museums, biodiversity databases, and the slopes of Centinela—found no proof of any extinctions, but abundant evidence that Centinela's flora lives on in the scattered remaining fragments of coastal Ecuador's forests.

"It's a miracle," said lead author Dawson White, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. "Many of Centinela's plants are still on the brink of extinction, but fortunately the reports of their demise were exaggerated. There's still time to save them and turn this story around."

The study revealed that one reason earlier researchers overstated the likelihood of extinction at Centinela was due to the fact that those researchers were collecting a bounty of new and undescribed species, with limited information on which plant species grow where in the world's most diverse forests. In the decades since, those early collections have provided more than 50 new species.

As well, as botanists began to collect more widely and natural history museums digitized their specimens, plants previously thought to have gone extinct at Centinela have turned up at other sites in South America, while others were relocated in situ by the team. Of the 90 species originally presumed extinct, only one has not yet been rediscovered or confirmed to grow elsewhere.