Vanished

On the first of September 1914, a bird named Martha died in a cage in Cincinnati.

She was the last passenger pigeon. Within living memory of the people watching her, flocks of her species had darkened American skies in numbers estimated at three and a half billion - flocks that took days to pass overhead and broke the limbs off the trees they roosted in. The interval between the most abundant bird on the continent and the last one alive was roughly fifty years.

Vanished is an illustrated record of fifty animals that are gone, and of how each one ended. Every entry is accompanied by an original painting.

Inside you will find:

• Giants of the Ice Age - mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, ground sloths and the argument over whether climate or hunting finished them
• Islands and the Things We Brought - the dodo, the moa, and the rats, cats and goats that came ashore with the ships
• Hunted to the Last - Steller's sea cow, gone twenty-seven years after it was discovered; the great auk, whose final pair was killed by collectors
• The Long Twentieth Century - the thylacine, protected by law fifty-nine days before the last one died
• Gone in Our Lifetime - species that were alive when you were, several of them lost within the past ten years

Extinction is usually imagined as slow and geological. It is not. Most of the animals here disappeared inside a human lifetime, many while being watched, described and photographed. This book is a record rather than an indictment - and it is not a hopeless one, since the same century that produced most of these losses also produced the science that has since pulled bison, condors and Arabian oryx back from the same edge.

Illustrated throughout. Written to inform rather than sensationalize.