History, Prehistory, Present, and Future of Biological Extinctions.
Finalist for the 2020 Giancarlo Dosi Science Communication Prize.

Dragons, cyclopes, giants, unicorns, phoenixes. When ancient people stumbled upon the remains of unknown animals, they immediately attributed them to fantastic creatures. Later, scientists demonstrated that these were merely ancestral fantasies: monsters don’t exist, as we all know today. Yet, the explanation scholars gave for those relics was even more terrifying: before us, countless other living beings inhabited our planet, but now they are gone. On Earth, nothing lasts forever..

In The Melancholy of the Mammoth, Massimo Sandal narrates the grand history of extinctions—from the Permian extinction to the “sixth,” which we are involved in—and what this means for us, our relationship with nature, and the ways we are attempting to bring species that disappeared years, or even centuries, ago back to life. He recounts vanished lands, oceans of fire, meteorites crashing from space, eras inhabited by microscopic organisms, fearsome plants, and extraordinary animals like the dodo, the thylacine, the saber-toothed tiger, and the dinosaurs. Like stepping into a gigantic natural history museum where everything suddenly comes to life, we witness the resurrection of a Pyrenean ibex that disappeared a hundred years ago through cell samples preserved in liquid nitrogen, the “construction” of an ancient aurochs through crossbreeding similar species, the opening of an actual Jurassic Park in Russia, and the ambitious, sometimes crazy, attempts to bring back our favorite prehistoric animal: the mammoth—a source of inspiration for writers and artists, beloved by children, and the object of scientists’ desires.

In the last hall of this peculiar museum, we find ourselves—the dominant and invincible species. Or perhaps, simply the next to disappear.