Alphone Guichenot described Correlophus ciliatus from New Caledonia in 1866. Records afterwards were thin to nonexistent, and by the twentieth century the species was generally treated as extinct, a plausible fate for a forest endemic on an island with introduced predators and heavy nickel mining.
In 1994 a survey following a tropical storm relocated the animal in the south of Grande Terre. Founder stock was exported legally in small numbers, and because crested geckos breed readily, tolerate room temperature and can be raised on prepared fruit-based diets rather than live insects, the captive population expanded enormously within two decades.
The wild population remains restricted and is listed as Vulnerable, with introduced fire ants among the identified threats. It is worth being precise about the relationship between the two populations: the abundance of captive crested geckos does nothing to secure the wild one, and almost all animals in the trade descend from a small number of founders, so their genetic representation of the wild species is narrow.