Yangtze river dolphin rediscovered!

After looking at the picture multiple times and looking at pictures at finless porpoises and baijis... It looks more like a finless porpoise. It's a little lighter in color than the baiji and looks a bit rounder. The picture is too blurry to tell though...
 
THAT is the new of the week, the new of the year, the new of the century!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Baiji is ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I never in my life would have expected that absolutely amazing giant surprise! I'm trembling of happiness!!!!!!!!!!!
 
After reading the whole thread and replies, I'm not so super-excited, as there is a possibility that it's not a baiji... But let's to have hope!

I suppose that now a lot of searching for the dolphin will be made in the zone where it was spot. I hope that they're able to radio-tag it with a transmitter.
 
ZooBinh said:
Maybe the picture is blurry, but the people that saw it knew it was a baiji.... I’m just staying on the hopeful side...
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As @pachyderm pro observes, nobody can find an article about the discovery anywhere. (Looked myself.) Which considering the magnitude of the sighting, if true, is very surprising. The last supposed sighting I saw when searching was fall of 2016, and I saw many credible sites like Nat Geo showing skepticism. We all hope the non descriptive whatever it is in the photo happens to be a Baiji, but personally I'd like to see a photo showing more distinctly the features of a Baiji as proof... That low grayish profile could be any number of things. And unfortunately, people don't always consider their options... wishful thinking and/or a brief look can easily lead to a misidentification. Nondescript blurry photos are hard to take as proof too... Not to start an argument, but we see it all the time with the Loch Ness monster, bigfoot, etc...
 
Great Argus said:
As @pachyderm pro observes, nobody can find an article about the discovery anywhere. (Looked myself.) Which considering the magnitude of the sighting, if true, is very surprising. The last supposed sighting I saw when searching was fall of 2016, and I saw many credible sites like Nat Geo showing skepticism. We all hope the non descriptive whatever it is in the photo happens to be a Baiji, but personally I'd like to see a photo showing more distinctly the features of a Baiji as proof... That low grayish profile could be any number of things. And unfortunately, people don't always consider their options... wishful thinking and/or a brief look can easily lead to a misidentification. Nondescript blurry photos are hard to take as proof too... Not to start an argument, but we see it all the time with the Loch Ness monster, bigfoot, etc...
Click to expand...
I also saw the 2016 thing!
 
Never say never, yet I remain somewhat skeptical:
10 years without any baiji reports from the region…..
 
Kifaru Bwana said:
Never say never, yet I remain somewhat skeptical:
10 years without any baiji reports from the region…..
Click to expand...
There actually have been reports of Baijis in the last 10 years. People just thought they were misidentifications, like how most "Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers" are actually Pileated Woodpeckers.
 
ZooBinh said:
Maybe the picture is blurry, but the people that saw it knew it was a baiji....
Click to expand...

I’m pretty sure this same kind of situation has happened before. In around 2004, researchers said that they found Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. The evidence was sketchy at best (notice a trend!), but the researchers definitively said that it was an Ivory Billed Woodpecker. This may be due to the fact that the researchers wanted the Woodpeckers to be alive, even if the evidence wasn’t the best. So, I’m not sure if this is a river dolphin, but it’s still interesting news.
 
I really doubt it's a baiji. And even if it is, what good would it do? It'd still likely be the only one, the chances of it finding another surviving one to mate with are astronomical... there's going to be supposed sightings for hundreds of years, especially with a marine animal. There's still several tasmanian tiger "sightings" every year and people who swear up and down it's alive, same with just about every decent sized animal. And those are ones that live on land and would be much easier to find.
 
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