Was it premature to declare the giant Tongan Ground Skink Tachygyia microlepis extinct?

The Tongan Ground Skink, Tachygyia microlepis (Duméril & Bibron, 1839), is a large skink endemic to the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. It is only known by its two syntypes, which are held in the Paris Natural History Museum (MNHN) as MNHN-RA 2919 and 5493, respectively. The species is listed as extinct in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (Pippard 2012, Allison et al. 2022). Although described from a single island located in the southern part of the Kingdom of Tonga (Tongatapu Island), this giant lizard (up to 177 mm in snout–vent length) might still survive on Tongatapu satellite islets or other peripheral larger islands like ‘Eua Island. Those islands are less degraded by
anthropogenic activities than Tongatapu (261 km²), which has been heavily impacted by agriculture for nearly 3000 years and now is 90% deforested with only 3.2% of its land area still hosting forest fragments (Wiser et al. 2002)....