Lazarus Taxon

[Moontanman]

PBS produced a show i saw last night discussing what they called Lazarus Taxia. Animals long thought to be extinct but then unexpectedly found. They suggested that the coelacanth would be an example of this phenomena. One of the reasons given is that some species simply become too rare or live mostly in environments that do not produce fossils with any regularity. A cambrian creature known as Anomalocaris has been found to have survived into the Ordovician seas from the Cambrian and was first only found in the Burgess Shale and thought to have become extinct during the Cambrian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalocaris . 

The reasons this happens is due in part to the fragmentary fossil record and the rarity of actual fossilization of some animals due to where they lived or their rarity.

One group of creatures that has always fascinated me are the dinosaurs, I remember being spellbound by reports of creature like the Mokele Mbembe supposed to be a surviving sauropod dinosaur. Other surviving dinosaurs have been suggest in cryptozoological circles from theropods to ceratopsians.   

Does this concept of Lazarus Taxia represent a real possible explanation or possibility of really ancient animals still being alive in some odd or unusual habitat?