10-minute read
keywords: wildlife conservation

Whether you embrace the concept or think that we are on the cusp of it, the term “Sixth Extinction” serves as a useful shorthand to bring into focus the scale and tempo of recent and ongoing biodiversity loss. Famous victims such as the dodo, the thylacine, the passenger pigeon, or the great auk will immediately jump to mind, but they are just the tip of the iceberg of extinction. Few people will think of the St. Helena olive, the Bramble Cay melomys, or the Christmas Island forest skink. And therein lies the problem: behind the faceless statistics of loss lie numerous stories of unique evolutionary lineages that have been snuffed out. In this emotional gut punch of a book, author and journalist Tom Lathan takes the unconventional approach of examining ten species that have gone extinct since 2000, nine of which you will likely never have heard of. Lathan momentarily resurrects them to examine what led to their loss and speaks to the people who tried to save them.

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