Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction

In this plaintive if occasionally grating history, Allen (Broken Heart, Shared Heart, Healing Heart), an Australian minister, presents intimate portraits of 31 extinct species. She recounts each animal’s story from its own perspective, as when she describes how hungry sailors hunted the manatee-like Steller’s sea cow to extinction in the 1700s: “Our tasty flesh, wonderful fat and hides, which would be made into shoes and belts, led to our downfall.” Reconstructing how species likely behaved in the wild, Allen notes that quagga, a subspecies of zebra, congregated near hartebeest and ostriches, whose superior eyesight and sense of smell helped alert the quagga to predators. Though the first-person voice aspires to instill empathy, it instead comes across as childish (“The ‘dodo’. What a stupid name! Sets me up as a thing of ridicule”). The fascinating trivia does a better job of driving home the wondrous biodiversity lost in the extinction of any species. For instance, Allen describes the remarkable reproductive practices of the female gastric-brooding frog, which would suspend the production of gastric acid before swallowing her own fertilized eggs and then wait for them to grow into frogs in her upper intestine and crawl out of her mouth about six weeks later. The annoying narrative voice aside, this will hold the interest of animal lovers. Photos. (Aug.)