Title:

Vanishing Treasures

Author:

Katherine Rundell

Category:

Non-fiction

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

April 6, 2025

his short book, Vanishing Treasures - just 200 pages long - is a wonderful delight to read. Although it is listed as a children's book, adults will also certainly marvel at the animals described. Each chapter is just 6 to 10 pages, and quickly introduces a creature and then provides some facts that inform the reader why that species is so special and amazing. There is a lot here to like. I recommend this book for all readers.

Twenty-two species are presented, with a twenty-third chapter titled Humans (a species that certainly is not endangered).

Each chapter also presents some distressing information about why these animals face extinction. Whether it is direct slaughter (gunning down wolves and giraffes - the US refuses to designate giraffes as endangered despite the fact that there are fewer that 68,000 remaining alive - and so in a ten year period, American hunters imported 3744 dead giraffes, five percent of the total world's population), or habitat loss, or climate change, these animals are quickly sliding down the steep slope to extinction. It is sobering to read about these animals and then realize that they might soon vanish from the planet forever.

Wombats can run up to 25 miles per hour, faster than any human has ever run. They are marsupials, but their pouch faces backwards so that as they dig into their burrows, the dirt does not get kicked into the pouch.

The giant Greenland shark has such a slow metabolism that it does not reach sexual maturity until it is more than 100 years old, and can live to be older than 500. They can dive more than 7000 feet deep. They are only seen near the surface in very cold regions (like Greenland) but it is possible that they roam the depths of all of the oceans undetected.

Although common raccoons are in no danger of extinction, there are several subspecies that are threatened. The Cozumel raccoon lives only on the island, and their habitat is constantly whittled away as tourism expands to build more resorts. The Barbados raccoon is already extinct. Raccoons are quite smart. Researchers placed a desirable marshmallow in a bottle, floating on water but out of reach of the raccoons. When a human demonstrated that dropping pebbles into the bottle raised the water level, two of the eight raccoons immediately copied the behavior and retrieved their prized treat.

Full grown giraffes can run 35 mph, though they sometimes trip over their own hind legs. Their tongue is 20 inches long and is dark purplish-blue to protect it from the sun's rays. Their long neck is not used to allow them to forage for leaves at heights other animals cannot reach - giraffes eat leaves at the same heights as impalas and kudu. When they lower their head to drink water, a special vein is shut off to prevent blood from draining when they raise their head again, so they don't faint when they stand erect again.

Swifts spend most of their life in the air. They even sleep while flying - turning off one side of their brain and then the other. Because they land so infrequently, their legs are so atrophied that it was believed that they have no legs at all. Baby swifts strengthen themselves in the nest by doing wing-pushups, and then launch themselves from the nest and promptly fly without landing for the next ten months. They can eat as many as 100,000 insects in a day, but extensive use of insecticides is destroying their food supply.

When ring-tailed lemurs are frightened or wish to bond, they clump together in furry ball of individuals that can be as large as a bicycle tire.

It is thought that Amelia Earhart crash landed on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the Pacific. When rescuers reached the island a week later, there was no sign of her, though distress signals had been received for five nights after her disappearance. Nikumaroro is populated with coconut hermit crabs. Coconut hermit crabs can reach up to 40" in diameter and live a hundred years. When researchers placed the carcass of a pig on the island, hermit crabs ribbed it to shreds and carried the fragments, including bones, back to their burrows. That may have been the fate of Earhart.

Harbor seals are capable of human speech. An orphaned harbor seal named Hoover that was raised by a Maine lobsterman. Hoover could say "hey, get over here!" Elephant seals can weigh more than 8,000 pounds, hold their breath for 2 hours, and dive more than a mile deep into the ocean.

There are annually reportedly forty attacks on humans by bears, but only about twenty are fatal; far fewer than the number of human deaths that result from falling televisions, faulty lawnmowers or toppling vending machines.

The horn of the narwhal is actually a tooth. It keeps growing for up to ten years, until it is as wide as ten inches at its root. The horns, of course, were said to be unicorn horns in Medieval Europe.

Crows can identify individual humans and they remember who treats them well and who their enemies are. A woman who fed crows every day once went out into a field to take photographs, and accidentally dropped and lost her lens caps. When she got home, the lens cap was resting on the edge of the bird bath. Video evidence showed a crowing bringing the lens cap to the bird bath, carefully washing it, then lying it on the rim of the bird bath to be found. Although the common crow is abundant, the Hawaiian crow, the alala, is near extinction.

Brown hares can run 50 mph and leap ten feet. Hares run in a zigzag route to disrupt the momentum of a pursuing predator. Hares are called jackrabbits in the United States. In England, they can be hunted year round, and English gun down an estimated 300,000 annually.

In medieval times, it was thought that wolves caused cancer. Wolves, unless rabid, will not attack humans. They prefer to eat elk and deer. Wolves will also eat melons, figs, grain, grass, blueberries and raspberries. Wolves don't howl at the moon, they howl to communicate over great distances with each other.

I was going to write a paragraph extracting an interesting fact from each chapter in the book, but this review is already too long and I still have Hedgehog, Elephant Seahorse, Pangolin, Stork, Spider, Bat, Tuna, Golden Mole and Human to go. So I will simply say this book is an excellent read and highly recommend it.

I thought I knew all the awful things that greedy humans can do, but in the chapter on blue fin tuna, I learned that the Mitsubishi corporation owns 40 percent of the blue fin catch. They have been carefully hoarding stacks of frozen blue fins at -76 degrees, waiting for the day when the blue fin are declared extinct, because the value of their frozen fish will skyrocket. Poachers are incentivized to gun down rhinos and tigers, even if they don't have horns or pelts worth stealing, because shady owners have stockpiles of rhino horns and tiger pelts that will suddenly become more value after extinction - therefore, the sooner extinction happens, the better! Sometimes I really hate my fellow men.