The Gallery Of Lost Species

Just as thirteen year-old Edith Walker is about to leave childhood behind, she thinks she spots a unicorn high on a slope while hiking. Her daydreamer father Henry convinces her that what she’s seen is real. Edith’s sighting of the fabled creature – and her unfailing belief that the imaginary creature will eventually be found – sets in motion a series of events that impact the next decade of her life. Edith grows up in her big sister Vivienne’s shadow. While the beautiful Viv is forced by the girls’ overbearing mother Constance to compete in child beauty pageants, plain-looking Edith follows in her father’s footsteps, collecting oddities, studying coins and reading from moldy books that only serve to exacerbate her asthma. Eventually, a family trip to the Rocky Mountains and a chance encounter with a handsome geology student named Liam changes the course of the sisters’ relationship forever. As Viv rebels against her mother and pageantry to become a painter, she embarks on a downward spiral into addiction. Edith then finds herself torn between a desire to save her sister and pursuing her own love for Liam. Fulfilling her father’s wish for her to work in a museum, Edith takes a job cataloguing artwork at the National Gallery of Canada, where she meets an elderly cryptozoologist named Theo. Theo is searching for “Gauguin’s mystery bird” and has devoted his entire life to tracking down extinct animals. Navigating her way through Vivienne’s dark landscape while trying to win Liam’s heart, Edith develops an unlikely friendship with Theo when she realizes they might have more in common than she imagined: they are both trying to retrieve something that may be impossible to bring back to life. The Gallery of Lost Species is about finding solace in unexpected places — in works of art, in people and in animals that the world has forgotten.

Just as thirteen year-old Edith Walker is about to leave childhood behind, she thinks she spots a unicorn high on a slope while hiking. Her daydreamer father Henry convinces her that what she's seen is real. Edith's sighting of the fabled creature - and her unfailing belief that the imaginary creature will eventually be found - sets in motion a series of events that impact the next decade of her life. Edith grows up in her big sister Vivienne's shadow. While the beautiful Viv is forced by the girls' overbearing mother Constance to compete in child beauty pageants, plain-looking Edith follows in her father's footsteps, collecting oddities, studying coins and reading from moldy books that only serve to exacerbate her asthma. Eventually, a family trip to the Rocky Mountains and a chance encounter with a handsome geology student named Liam changes the course of the sisters' relationship forever. As Viv rebels against her mother and pageantry to become a painter, she embarks on a downward spiral into addiction. Edith then finds herself torn between a desire to save her sister and pursuing her own love for Liam. Fulfilling her father's wish for her to work in a museum, Edith takes a job cataloguing artwork at the National Gallery of Canada, where she meets an elderly cryptozoologist named Theo. Theo is searching for "Gauguin's mystery bird" and has devoted his entire life to tracking down extinct animals. Navigating her way through Vivienne's dark landscape while trying to win Liam's heart, Edith develops an unlikely friendship with Theo when she realizes they might have more in common than she imagined: they are both trying to retrieve something that may be impossible to bring back to life. The Gallery of Lost Species is about finding solace in unexpected places -- in works of art, in people and in animals that the world has forgotten.

Caught on camera prior to their demise, this book reveals the surprisingly rich photographic record of now-extinct animals. A photograph of an animal long-gone evokes a feeling of loss more than a painting ever can. Often tinted sepia or black-and-white, these images were mainly taken in zoos or wildlife parks, and in a handful of cases featured the last known individual of the species. There are some familiar examples, such as Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon, or the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, recently fledged and perching happily on the hat of one of the biologists that had just ringed it. But for every Martha there are a number of less familiar extinct birds and mammals that were caught on camera. The photographic record of extinction is the focus of this remarkable book, written by the world's leading authority on vanished animals, Errol Fuller. Lost Animals features photographs dating from around 1870 to as recently as 2004, the year that saw the demise of the Hawaiian Po'ouli. From a mother Thylacine and her pups to now-extinct birds such as the Heath Hen and Carolina Parakeet, Fuller tells the tale of each animal, why it became extinct, and discusses the circumstances surrounding the photography itself, in a book rich with unique images. The photographs themselves are poignant and compelling. They provide a tangible link to animals that have now vanished forever, in a book that brings the past to life while delivering a warning for the future.

We hear routinely about dinosaurs unearthed in the Gobi Desert, about new marsupials found in the forests of Madagascar, about darling deep sea squid in the polar regions. These discoveries tend to be accompanied by wondrous feats of adventuring scientists. But just as one can experience the world in a backyard, or farther reaches of the world with a good book and a comfy armchair, scientists themselves know that the natural history museums of the world contain some of the best terrain for discovering new species. In recent years scientists have found in museum drawers and cabinets a new rove beetle collected by Darwin, a tiny lungless salamander thinner than a matchstick, a monkey from the Brazilian rainforest, and a 40 million year old beardog. The Lost Species shares the thrill of spelunking in museum basements, digging in museum trays, and breathing new life in taxidermied beings--a in a days' adventure for the scientists in this book. These discoveries help tell the story of life, and the priceless collections of natural history museums.

A teenaged pacifist and a PTSD-afflicted Marine form an unexpected bond over a secret buried in a decommissioned nuclear missile silo. Twyla Jane Lee has one goal. To finish senior year so she can get out of her military hometown of Halo, Montana. But to graduate, she needs to complete forty hours of community service, and that means helping out a rude and reclusive former Marine named Gabriel Finch. A young veteran of the conflicts in the Middle East, Gabriel spends his days holed up in a decommissioned nuclear missile silo on his family farm. Twyla assumes he’s just another doomsday prepper, readying his underground shelter for Armageddon. But soon she finds out the truth, and it takes her breath away. Gradually the two misfits form a bond, and Twyla begins to unearth the secrets that have left the Marine battling ghosts. Her discoveries force her to question her views on the wars until she realizes that even if she gets out of Halo, she won’t ever be able to leave Gabriel Finch’s story behind her. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3 Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.

"The Great Auk, the Japanese Wolf, the Atlas Bear, the Cape Lion, the Elephant Bird, the Mauritius Giant Tortoise -- these are among the hundreds of beautiful birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish which the world will never see again. David Day and four leading wildlife artists have worked from expert research, museum records and contemporary sketches and notes, to recreate for the modern reader these beautiful and sometimes extraordinary creatures. The author's immediate and startling text describes the combination of cruelty, startling thoughtlessness and sheer commercial greed that largely led to the extinction of these species. His highly readable descriptions of each animal's appearance, behaviour and habitat, complemented by the authentic, breathtaking illustrations provide a dramatic historical record. David Day documents for the first time the extinction of almost 300 species and subspecies over the last 300 years. It is a fact that the rate of extinction during the last three centuries has multiplied several hundred times its previous rate and is still increasing ... Therefore, alongside reference maps and classification listings, David Day gives a "waiting list" of 400 critically endangered species ..."--Inside front cover

The Europeans who colonized North America more than three centuries ago encountered fantastical creatures: flying squirrels, ruby-throated hummingbirds, the easily tamed beaver. Their literature of discovery - by turns comic, cruel, and adulatory - provides a revealing glimpse of the taxonomies they carried with them into their so-called New World. Sharon Kirsch weaves early settler accounts, fables, children's stories, natural histories and 21st century science in a quirky narrative that probes our complicated relationship with the other creatures that share the planet. Illustrated with twenty period drawings, and peppered with verbatim accounts by these early settlers, What Species of Creatures is a rich and satisfying stew of odd historical facts and figures.

The rapid growth of the American environmental movement in recent decades obscures the fact that long before the first Earth Day and the passage of the Endangered Species Act, naturalists and concerned citizens recognized—and worried about—the problem of human-caused extinction. As Mark V. Barrow reveals in Nature’s Ghosts, the threat of species loss has haunted Americans since the early days of the republic. From Thomas Jefferson’s day—when the fossil remains of such fantastic lost animals as the mastodon and the woolly mammoth were first reconstructed—through the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir, Barrow shows how Americans came to understand that it was not only possible for entire species to die out, but that humans themselves could be responsible for their extinction. With the destruction of the passenger pigeon and the precipitous decline of the bison, professional scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike began to understand that even very common species were not safe from the juggernaut of modern, industrial society. That realization spawned public education and legislative campaigns that laid the foundation for the modern environmental movement and the preservation of such iconic creatures as the bald eagle, the California condor, and the whooping crane. A sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative that unites the fascinating stories of endangered animals and the dedicated individuals who have studied and struggled to protect them, Nature’s Ghosts offers an unprecedented view of what we’ve lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.