Vanishing treasures A bestiary of extraordinary endangered creatures

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. (Nov.)

Literature, folklore, history, and science inform these profiles of 22 endangered species. The award-winning author of young adult books and a superb biography of John Donne turns her sharp literary style and wit to endangered animals in this brisk, eye-opening, thoroughly entertaining book. Animals who exhibit "everlasting flight, a self-galvanizing heart and a baby who learns names in the womb" may seem like inventions, she writes, but the natural world is "so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the surface." Meet the speedy swift, the American wood frog, and the dolphin. Early on, Rundell reminds us that we've lost "more than half of all wild things that lived." The quick Australian wombat, one of poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti's favorite pets, is "one of the rarest land mammals in the world." It's possible that some rarely seen, slow, half-blind Greenland sharks are more than 500 years old. She's furious that America has refused to designate the giraffe as an endangered species, even though its numbers have dropped 40% in 30 years. She relishes the strength of the coconut hermit crab, named after the hard-shelled fruit it can crack open, whose intricate group interactions "make the politics of Renaissance courts look simplistic." Of the eight species of bear, six are at risk or endangered, and "the number of hares in Britain has declined by 80 percent in the last century." Storks, conversely, are a "true success story of back-from-the-brink." Other animals she regards with reverence and concern for their future are seahorses (the majority of their species could be gone by 2050), pangolins ("the world's only rainbow mammal...currently the most trafficked animals in the world"), and the blind, iridescent golden mole, which can hear ants and beetles crawling aboveground. Young and old will savor Rundell's infectious enthusiasm for these remarkable and infinitely varied creatures. A clarion call for preservation by way of a delightful bestiary. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.