Vanishing Treasures

Katherine Rundell presents a thematically organized bestiary centered on 22 endangered or threatened creatures. Each chapter blends natural history, cultural history, literary anecdote, and conservation advocacy to argue that the natural world's wonders far exceed human fables, and that we are destroying those wonders at catastrophic speed.

The book opens with examples of extraordinary animal ability: The common swift flies roughly 1.2 million miles in its lifetime and sleeps on the wing; the American wood frog freezes solid each winter and spontaneously revives in spring; dolphins whistle a signature call to their young in the womb for months before birth. Rundell frames the book as a collection of moments in which humans have "collided with living things, in joy and destruction, grandeur and folly" (2). She catalogs centuries of misunderstanding about animals, including the belief that hunted beavers would bite off their own testicles. These errors, she argues, reveal human hopes, anxieties, and desires. Every species in the book is endangered or contains an endangered subspecies, and in the last 50 years the world's wildlife has declined by an average of almost 70 percent. She compares humanity to passengers on Noah's Ark who are "setting fire to the stables, poisoning the water" (4).

The opening chapter profiles the wombat through the obsession of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who kept wombats at his Chelsea home in the 1860s. Rundell details the wombat's surprising capabilities, including running at 25 miles an hour and crushing predators with the bone-hard cartilage of its rump. Australian settlers slaughtered wombats as pests, classifying them as vermin by 1906 and introducing bounties by 1925. The northern hairy-nosed wombat is now critically endangered, with only 251 survivors counted in a recent census.

The Greenland shark chapter reveals these animals as the planet's oldest vertebrates. Danish physicist Jan Heinemeier dated them by testing eye proteins for carbon-14, a radioactive isotope whose levels vary by era, estimating the largest tested female at between 272 and 512 years old. The shark's near-blindness from parasitic crustaceans and urea-laden flesh that must be fermented for months before consumption contrast with its near-mythic endurance.

The raccoon chapter opens with Rebecca, a raccoon sent to President Calvin Coolidge as a prospective Thanksgiving dinner in 1926, who instead became a White House pet. Rundell addresses the racial history of the slur "coon," tracing its transformation from a term for shrewd white frontiersmen into a violently anti-Black epithet. She turns to the Cozumel raccoon, of which perhaps 300 remain, and notes the extinction of the Barbados raccoon, last seen in 1964.

The giraffe chapter surveys centuries of human bewilderment, from the Roman poet Horace calling the giraffe a "hybrid monster" to the Persian geographer Ibn al-Faqih theorizing its parentage from a panther and a camel, and the Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He identifying giraffes as qilin, a mythical hooved chimera. The United States is one of the largest markets for giraffe parts, with fewer than 68,000 remaining in the wild, and the Nubian giraffe's population has fallen by 98 percent in four decades.

Chapters on the swift, the lemur, and the hermit crab continue interweaving marvel and loss. The swift uses unihemispheric sleep on the wing, shutting down one brain half at a time, and flies fast enough to circle the Earth five times a year, but British breeding numbers have dropped by 50 percent in two decades as old nesting sites are demolished. Rundell recounts a personal encounter with an indri lemur at a sanctuary outside Antananarivo, Madagascar, and reports that 94 percent of all lemur species are threatened, largely due to deforestation. The hermit crab chapter opens with the theory that coconut crabs may have consumed aviator Amelia Earhart's body after her 1937 disappearance, then explores the crabs' social behavior, including queuing by size to exchange shells in rapid succession.

The seal chapter introduces Hoover, a harbor seal adopted by a Maine fisherman in the 1970s who learned to speak English phrases, and explores selkie mythology from the North Atlantic, in which shape-shifters between human and seal form are trapped in marriage when their skins are stolen. The bear chapter ranges from the Roman naturalist Pliny's myth that cubs are born as formless lumps licked into shape through Elizabethan bear-baiting, a blood sport in which chained bears fought dogs, to the modern crisis: Six of eight bear species are at risk, and thousands of Asiatic black bears and sun bears are caged and milked for bile in a trade worth $2 billion.

The narwhal chapter reveals that Europe's prized "unicorn horns," including one tested by Russian ruler Ivan the Terrible in 1584, were narwhal tusks. The tusk contains roughly 10 million nerve endings and may function as a sensory organ for detecting water salinity. Climate change threatens narwhals by shrinking ice cover, while increased Arctic shipping creates noise pollution that risks rendering their communication inaudible. The crow chapter highlights the species' intelligence and focuses on the Hawaiian crow, the 'alalā, declared extinct in the wild in 2002. A 2016 reintroduction of 30 birds failed, with only five surviving before being returned to captivity.

Chapters on the hare, the wolf, and the hedgehog document the gap between mythology and biological reality. The hare, sacred to the Greek goddess Aphrodite and capable of conceiving while already pregnant, has declined by 80 percent in Britain in the last century. The wolf, vilified since biblical times, was driven to near-extinction through centuries of settler hunting, though its 1995 reintroduction to Yellowstone Park demonstrated ecological importance when forests regenerated within a decade. UK hedgehog numbers have fallen from roughly 30 million in the 1950s to under one million.

The elephant chapter details the trunk's 40,000 muscles and the species' ability to communicate through infrasound, low-frequency sound below human hearing range, audible to other elephants six miles away. The Borneo pygmy elephant, of which approximately 1,500 remain, faces extinction from palm-oil deforestation and poaching. The seahorse is the only animal in which the male gives birth, erupting up to 1,500 fry of which less than 0.5 percent survive. The pangolin, the only mammal entirely covered in scales, is the most trafficked animal in the world, its scales used in traditional Chinese medicine.

The stork chapter recounts the 1822 discovery of a bird in Germany with an African spear through its neck, which proved that birds migrate thousands of miles rather than hibernating locally. The spider chapter argues that without spiders, which consume 400 to 800 million tons of insects annually, humanity would face global famine. The bat chapter explains echolocation, the sonar system by which bats navigate using ultrasonic pulses, and recounts a World War II scheme to use bats as incendiary weapons that accidentally destroyed the testing center. The tuna chapter exposes "extinction speculation": The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls 40 percent of the world bluefin market and freezes massive stocks, a bet, conservationists believe, that prices will skyrocket upon the fish's extinction.

The penultimate chapter reveals the golden mole as the world's only iridescent mammal, its fur shifting through turquoise, navy, purple, and gold. Blind and living underground, the mole is unaware of its own radiance. Scientists believe the iridescence is an accidental by-product of fur evolved for easier burrowing, "glory without necessary purpose" (183). Rundell connects this to the fact that human beings are also bioluminescent, emitting photons too weak for our eyes to detect.

The final chapter retells the parable of the Sibylline books, drawn largely from writer Douglas Adams's version in Last Chance to See: An old woman offers a city nine books of wisdom for one sack of gold; refused, she burns three and returns offering six for double the price, repeating the cycle until the city buys the last book at enormous cost. The old woman departs: "You should have seen what was burned" (190). Rundell draws the parallel to humanity's relationship with the natural world and insists that "so much can still be saved" (190). In an Author's Note, she calls for political action, divestment from fossil fuels, reduced consumption, and protest, rejecting the claim that it is too late as a form of nihilism.