BOOK OF THE MONTH: FEBRUARY 2014

Title        : Lost Animals:
                  Extinction and the Photographic Record
Author    : Errol Fuller
Pages       : 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury Natural History
Price        : £ 16.75
ISBN        :10-1408172151

'Lost Animals:Extinction and the Photographic Record ' is a handsome but sad record of animals that existed for millennia-long enough for photography to be invented but have now disappeared from the face of the Earth. The images are accompanied by short, evocative texts about the creatures and the naturalists who recorded their existence. To compensate for these limitations, the appendix includes paintings of many of the creatures, including some by John James Audubon.

Among the animals featured are the Thylacines, also called Tasmanian tigers because of their stripes. In fact, writes Fuller, a British writer who has also written books about the dodo and the auk, the animals looked more like dogs than like tigers, and they were marsupials, related to kangaroos.In addition, it is believed that they could not withstand competition from dingoes brought to Australia by aborigines, Fuller notes. The last known thylacine died in 1936 in a zoo. 

Fuller also draws attention to the fate of the Caribbean monk seal and the paradise parrot. Christopher Columbus was the first European to kill and eat the Caribbean monk seal. This encounter began a pattern of hunting the seals, mostly for their oil and skins rather than their meat that lasted for centuries, until the last reliable sighting of the species occurred in 1952.

In 1844, the naturalist John Gilbert identified a new, beautiful parrot with a remarkable array of colors blue, green, yellow, red and brown in the Australian outback. A little more than a year later, he was killed during a fight with aborigines; the last view of the paradise parrot he had discovered was in 1928. The likely reasons for the parrot’s decline were the loss of seeds it lived on when lands were taken over for cattle and sheep grazing, as well as being hunted by such non-native predators as rats and foxes.

Review Courtesy: http://www.washingtonpost.com