Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell is a short and interesting book subtitled A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures. Rundell in separate chapters covers animals including the seahorse, American wood frog, lemur, golden mole, wombat, narwhal, pangolin, and Greenland shark.
Rundell notes that in the last fifty years, the world's wildlife has declined by an average of almost seventy percent. She makes a compelling argument that these animals, many which teeter on the brink of extinction, have a right to remain, and celebrates in the book just how interesting and different they are.
The American wood frog allows itself to freeze solid for winter, with it's heart stopping for the season. The Greenland shark can live to be over five hundred years old. The swift flies at least ten months a year, sleeping in the air, with one brain hemisphere shut off while the other remains alert. The golden mole is the only mammal with iridescence, and the Somali golden mole to our knowledge has never been seen alive. The book is written as a call to act, to not give up on vanishing animals and to do the climate change mitigation needed to keep many of these species in our world.
