abstract
| - Something that applies to many a videogame boss (especially in the case of a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere), Kaiju or Monster of the Week - you come across a creature that looks unlike anything else you've seen or will see in that work's universe, but only once. Bonus Points if it would be particularly hard for an ecosystem to support more than one of it. Creators contemplating for the existence of more of these tends to be a gap in their World Building, but tends to be a case where the MST3K Mantra applies in full force. However, for Long Runners, this may become a temporary trope, as a family/species and natural habitat may be created for the being in question at a later time. Obviously different from the One-Gender Race as there's only one specimen, and the concept of gender may not even apply. Also different from Last of His Kind, as that implies the existence of more of the same species in the past, or A Kind of One, where a whole species is known by the name of its most famous member, who may initially have been this. Note that a Single Specimen Species is defined as being basically unexplained and therefore Ecologically Implausible. So the Last of His Kind can't "become" this, since that includes human survivors of a lost tribe, animals that were wiped out and so forth. However, A Kind of One may become a Single Specimen Species in subsequent works, following the original; in which case it may be a case of Call a Smeerp a Rabbit since the characters have certainly never seen it before, but the readers have. Not to be confused with Only You Can Repopulate My Race (which is ecologically implausible for entirely different reasons). Examples of Single Specimen Species include:
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