What are extinct fauna supposed to be, really? There is a lot of misinformation.

Hey guys, I've started my playthrough with the launch of Cosmos, and generally most things in the game are explained pretty clearly, but there is a real oddity to the fauna system: Extinct Fauna.

It seems Extinct Fauna were first added to the game in 2020, with the Origins update. Googling it will give you a couple posts of people speculating, and especially on reddit you will find a lot of people who assumed, seemingly for no reason, that Extinct Fauna are Fauna that were previously alive but went extinct due to game updates. Variously suggesting that a player either had to discover it earlier, or that some internal error causes them to go occasionally show up as extinct.

This all seems very unlikely though, as whenever I found an "extinct" listing, it is always just one animal, and every planet I have been done has never been visited before me. So the consistency of it always being 1 species, and even on brand new worlds, makes all the explanations doubtful.

I've also heard people say that they would sometimes find the extinct species still alive, mysteriously walking around the planet.

So ultimately, I have no idea what the listing is there for. Nobody mentions them being connected to the ancient bones or anything. So what's up with it?