Prince Philip saved a rat-kangaroo from extinction by securing an Australian wildlife sanctuary 60 years ago.

       The population of Gilbert’s potoroo, the world’s rarest marsupial, is now believed to have passed 100, making specialist scientists confident that the animal has fought off extinction after it first vanished in the 1870s.

       Researchers are grateful that Prince Philip successfully lobbied against the destruction of remote bushland in Western Australia which, unbeknown to anyone, contained potoroos.

       The late royal had been trying to save an Australian bird on a visit to Perth in 1962, urging that its small coastal habitat should be spared from a new housing development.

       The Western Australian government eventually agreed, declaring the area 260 miles south of Perth a wildlife sanctuary.

       “If that [the destruction] had happened, there would have been cats and dogs and fire and it wouldn’t have been preserved,” Tony Friend, a research scientist who led Gilbert’s potoroo rescue efforts for 20 years, told The Times.

       Thirty years later, in 1994, the bush was found to be home to a Gilbert’s potoroo.

       It was discovered by Dr Elizabeth Sinclair, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, who was in shock when she saw the animal.

       “This is the most researched nature reserve in Western Australia. Surely they haven’t been sitting here under someone’s nose for, you know, for 120 years,” Sinclair told The Times.

       Dr Jackie Courtenay, a conservation biologist with the Gilbert’s Potoroo Action Group, said: “Prince Philip, in helping to save Two Peoples Bay, enabled Gilbert’s Potoroo to survive undetected — and thought extinct — until its rediscovery in 1994.”