Vanishing Treasures

September 2, 2024
Rundell (Impossible Creatures), a fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, presents a poignant survey of animal species whose survival is threatened by humans. She notes that because Greenland sharks take 150 years to reach sexual maturity, the species is likely still rebounding from overfishing in the early 1900s, and that punishing poverty and food scarcity in rural Madagascar have eroded traditional taboos against eating lemurs, exacerbating the harms of deforestation and imperiling the island’s 101 lemur species. Many anecdotes unexpectedly focus on endangered animals’ more populous cousins. For instance, a chapter on raccoons details the spoiled life of Rebecca, Calvin Coolidge’s pet common raccoon, while offering comparatively brief descriptions of the endangered Cozumel and extinct Barbados raccoons. Still, the abundant trivia fascinates (94% of all sexual behavior in giraffes is between males; the pangolin keeps its tongue, which is longer than its torso, in “an interior pouch near its hip”), and Rundell approaches her subjects with reverence, as when she writes that blind, iridescent golden moles “burrow and breed and hunt, live and die under the African sun, unaware of their beauty, unknowingly glowing.” Animal lovers will cherish this. Illus. Agent: Claire Wilson, RCW Literary.