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Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
So good, so good, so good.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Sadia Qureshi about a book that she's written, published by Penguin in 2025, titled Vanished An Unnatural History of Extinction, which is a really interesting exploration of a whole bunch of things, right? It's an intellectual history of kind of ideas of extinction. It also takes us back into a particular place and time where extinction sort of starts to be an idea that's talked about and kind of what that means for it to be an idea that's talked about. It's not just about scientific fact. I mean, it is, but also what does it even mean to have those sorts of facts? What does it mean for the rest of us? How does it change ideas that were prevalent before? There's a whole bunch of bunch of things really that looking at the idea of extinction can help us explore. So, Sadia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
Thank you so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? I mean, what kinds of questions did you want to ask that motivated a project like this?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
Gosh, there are so many ways. In some ways, it was a book that began as a way of bearing witness to a lot of violence across histories of empire. I originally thought that I was going to write a book about the notion of endangered races and how in the 19th century, there were lots of claims that various peoples across the world were on the verge of dying out. But as I looked into that, I suddenly realized that actually that story, in the way that I wanted to tell it, was inextricable from a broader story about the history of extinction. And so I started to think far, far beyond peoples to thinking about plants, animals, and about the very notion of extinction. And as I did that, I also realized that it was an opportunity to bring in my profound love of so many different ways of being. And so the book really transformed itself from a kind of fairly narrow academic account of histories of ideas about. About human extinction to something much.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it is a very broad book that gets us into a lot of very interesting things. So we're not going to be able to cover everything, of course, but hopefully we can give people a sense of the many things that you've explored and put together across the book. And I think the place I'd like to start is around the sort of, what does it mean to have an idea of extinction? I mean, I think in so many cases today, we take that part for granted. We might debate about whether which animals are going extinct at what sorts of speeds, but we don't sort of debate around the fact that, like, extinction is a thing that has happened, and yet that has not always been the case. So before we took the idea of extinction for granted, how would someone, say in the 18th century, think about the idea of a missing species?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
They'd probably think it was unlikely for very many reasons. Partly because if you imagine for someone who's religious, the natural world is part of God's creation. So the idea that something would be missing from God's creation would raise all sorts of issues because it would effectively create a flaw in nature. Certainly in terms of kind of Euro American ideas of what God's creation should be. So they would likely to be very, very suspicious. For a start, if they did accept something was missing, such as the dodo, it would certainly be because they could attribute it to human actions. So Human intervention in the natural world as a kind of one off. But the idea that it might be something that happened all the time and something that was a process that was part of life on earth would be really, really either alien or quite extremely cautiously kind of debated or even outrightly rejected because of its theological implications.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think this high stakes of this is something that might be strange for us to think about today. Do you mind if we spend just a moment talking a little bit more about kind of what exactly the theological implications were understood to be like? Why was it so high stakes to even consider this?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
It very much comes down to the idea of thinking that if the world has been created by God, it would be perfect. And one of the ways that we can see perfection in God's creation is that every living thing that has ever existed should exist. So this notion of plenitude and so the idea that something might, that there would be a process or some kind of loss that would be inherent in that creation immediately suggests a kind of imperfection. It also creates, if you believe in the idea of a kind of scale of nature, for instance, you know, that then creates a potential gap in the scale of creation, which is also quite problematic. But also if something does appear to be lost, for instance, in the 18th century, it's actually quite easy to rationalize or argue that it's not really lost at all. For instance, you know, you might suggest actually that it's still awaiting discovery. For instance, the species might have migrated. And so there are lots of theological reasons for it being very, very, for being very cautious about the claim. But there's also lots of very good reasons for being exceptionally cautious about accepting claims that anything has been lost at all. Because there's a very, very kind of conscious recognition that much of the world is unknown and awaits to be discovered. And there's a sense in which natural history at this point, through various kinds of voyages and so on, is constantly giving rise to knowledge of new forms and so on. So the idea that one could say in absolutist terms that something is lost is actually, you know, that's quite a tricky thing to claim.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's very helpful sort of scene setting so that we don't sort of assume that the way we think now is the way people have always thought. But in fact, what you've just laid out there makes it seem actually kind of amazing that that would ever change because there's a whole bunch of reasons you've just explained there. You know, whether or not you're Religious, for examp, that this wouldn't even be a conversation you'd kind of think to have or want to have. So when, why, where do ideas of extinction begin to develop?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
So there are suggestions that things have been lost, species have been lost before in the natural world, such as, you know, the dodo, but that's usually because of human intervention. But over the course of, you know, the 18th century, things start to be dug up that are very, very puzzling. These, what we might call petrified beasts, like what we would now recognize as fossils, but they often don't look like anything alive that people know about. And so that starts raising questions about how can we explain where these. What these things are and where are they? And then slowly there are particular kinds of examples that get paid particular, lots of attention to. So, for instance, one of the really most interesting examples is something like these elephantine beasts, like the mammoth or the mastodon that seem to be. Are being dug up in Siberia, in Ohio, in America. And lots of people start comparing them to living elephants and suggest actually they are very, very different. And in particular, during the French Revolution, there's a French naturalist called Georges Cuvier who compares these fossilized remains of these elephantine beasts with living African and Asian elephants. And at that time, African and Asian elephants are considered to be the same species. So through this extremely careful research, he suggests that not only are African and Asian elephants distinct species, but also the things he's looking at, like the mastodon and mammoth, they are also distinct. But importantly, he also suggests that they are extinct. And he imagines that they are extinct in some kind of unknown world and that have been lost due to some kind of catastrophe. And over the next decade, you know, he spends a lot of time comparing these fossil finds, some of which are well known, such as the pterodactyl or the Maastricht crocodile, which we now recognize as a Mosasaurus. They, you know, he essentially builds up this zoo of extinct fossilized beasts over a period of about a decade. And as this happens, geologists become more and more convinced that actually there was such a thing as effectively an age of reptiles before an age of mammals that we can see in the geological record and that many of these beasts no longer exist. And theologically, that can be that story, and that evidence can very quickly be adapted into a story where actually these become. You know, there's often a sense that actually it is inherent in the natural world, but it's a process by which the world is prepared for the arrival of human beings, for instance, Many people are actually quite relieved at the thought that these monstrous things no longer exist because of how frightening they would be. So there's actually a sense, well, you know, they may be lost, but it's also actually an advantage that they may be lost because it allows Earth to be a more habitable place for human beings. And then later, in the 19th century, as ideas of evolutionary development become embedded, extinction becomes a way in which actually things are said to have evolved. And sometimes people think of it as a process by which God perfects nature. So the theological ideas about extinction change and adapt very, very, kind of in very quickly and in fascinating terms.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is quite a change. Can we talk a little bit more about how that happens? I mean, how do we go, for example, from Paris to sort of one person and the immediate circle around him having these ideas to kind of these more, what sound like much more mainstream discussions, even integrated into theological understandings?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
Cuvier is important, extremely important, because he does some of the most convincing research, but he's not a lone genius. Other people have suggested or kind of flirted with the idea, as it were, of extinction being possible. But what he does, does and why he's so important is through these kind of detailed anatomical researches, establish a kind of cornucopia of evidence. And he is able to do that not just because he's a talented comparative anatomist, but actually because he's the right man in the right place at the right time. He's working in Paris, which. With some of the most extraordinarily kind of vast collections that are then available. And of course, this is as Napoleon is waging war across Europe and confiscated lots of natural history collections that are then being bought to Paris. At the same time, Paris, as a city is mushrooming, so the local quarries and so on are being dug up. And there's lots and lots of things that are being found in those quarries, including a marsupial and tapirs and things like that. And you can imagine these animals that only exist in other places as we know them now very, very quickly create, like, concrete evidence, you know, this evidence in stone, petrified, of a world that was completely unknown, unknown that is, underneath the layers of our feet. And once that happens, then it's actually a matter of, you know, geologists thinking through how that might have happened and what is the case. And because. Because that evidence, because it's a reinterpretation both of existing finds, such as things like the pterodactyl or these curiosities, as well as all these new finds, it, it, it makes sense to people that this is something that is happening.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And how does he transmit these sorts of findings? I mean, we know that today, for example, kind of nerdy comparative anatomy journals are not necessarily mainstream. So sort of how are people convinced? Like, what's the sort of logistics of the communication?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
I suppose so some of it is Cuvier writing himself. He does a lot of public lectures. He has beautiful printed books with absolutely gorgeous illustrations of these fossils. But also partly because Cuvier is so famous, there are many, many people who will translate bits of Cuvier into English or write about him in British periodicals, for instance, or American periodicals. So there's a kind of process of discussing and conversing with his ideas more broadly anyway, even for somebody who's never been to Paris or met him. And at the same time it's also incredibly important that he is at the center of a museum. So this is a form of public display of these kinds of things. And many of these fossilized species very, very quickly go on tour. So for instance, this Ohio animal, or the American incognitum as it's called when it's founded, which we would now recognize as a mastodon or a mammoth, is this beast is taken on tour and including in the uk. So for instance, there is a mastodon in Hintsy hall, in the central hall of the Natural History Museum in London. And that's one of the first specimens of a fossilized species that take, that's taken on tour and it's bought by the museum's, by Richard Owen who's working at the museum precisely because he sees it as such an important specimen. And so those public exhibitions, just as, as they are now, you know, museums are spaces and public exhibitions are spaces to encounter these lost beasts are exceptionally important in taking these ideas far beyond the dedicated scientific periodicals to anyone who is able to afford going to a show or who can then read about it in newspapers, can see posters, you know, or reviews of the shows and things like that. And so it's very, very quickly a combination of public spectacle, scientific literature as well as translation and public display in museums.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to understand. And kind of makes it clear then, kind of how this idea of, all right, there was this world a long time ago. Maybe it's a good thing it's not still around, but kind of that's a new way of thinking about things that sort of can become a more mainstream idea for people to sort of slot into. What does that then mean for thinking about kind of the world as it was then? Right. That's a story that's sort of, in some ways, safely in the past. Can you talk about maybe how and why these ideas about past extinctions were then applied in, for example, colonial contexts at the time?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
Cuvier is exploring these ideas within the context of prehistoric animals and the geological record. And when he describes extinction, it's very much talking about prehistoric animals. And he dies thinking, for instance, absolutely convinced that no such thing as human fossils have ever been found. But very, very quickly, that idea of animal extinction in the deep, deep past, in deep time, is taken far beyond that context. So, for instance, in the 1820s, there is a sense that various colon people start to claim that the Beothic and Newfoundland are on the verge of extinction. In 1829, the last of the. There's a woman called Shona Ditith who dies, who is said to be the last of her, the Beatholk. And very quickly this claim spreads. And not only is she characterized as the last of her people, but also it becomes quite common to claim that this is a warning, that this is a harbinger of what's to come for colonised peoples more broadly. So throughout the 1830s, you have people such as James Carls Pritchard, who is often called the father of British anthropology, talking about the extinction of races. And by that they mean human races, not animals. And so throughout the 1830s and 40s and 50s, this idea that colonized peoples are on the verge of extinction becomes very, very common. And there are various examples that are used to justify that assertion. So, for instance, in the 1830s, you have the dispossession of native nations in North America and the establishment of things like the Indian Removal act and forced dispossession and migration and removal, which is also rationalized and explained as necessary by colonial officials. But because it's claimed that if this is not done, native nations will go exist, will cease to exist entirely, and will go extinct. And in the 1870s, you also get very famous example of the aboriginal Tasmanians. So originally, this idea of extinction in the present isn't actually necessarily with respect to human beings, sorry, with animals, but actually with humans. That's the first sense of there being a sense of something in danger in the present. And it's not until the 1880s, 1890s and onwards, with the decline of things such as the passenger pigeon or the buff, sorry, the American bison, that we get a sense that actually things in the present are endangered. We do have the extinction of the great auk in the 1840s, and that's seen as a very important loss. And that's a really, really important indication that species that are abundant can become extinct in the present. But it's not an immediate sense in which it doesn't trigger a sense of there being threatened species as such. That comes much later, in the 1880s and 90s when that does start to happen.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
What were the sort of various reactions to it? I mean, you talk about a number of different groups in the book. Can you map that out for us?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
Some of them would be extremely shocking to us today. So, for instance, in the case of the passenger pigeon, there are. There's some legislation passed, but not very much. It's very ineffective narrative, even in the case of the bison. So one of the most important men that people that's involved in the conservation of the bison is William Temple Hornaday. And originally he sets out to go and shoot some bison so that he can stuff them and put them on display. He's a taxidermist at the Smithsonian. So the response of a lot of collectors, especially those working in museums, is to actually try and collect things that are rare because they're exceptionally valuable and they want them for their own museum collections. The great auk, for instance, the last known pair that are seen is at the hands of spec collectors who want to sell them to natural history collectors. So rarity actually makes things more valuable, both in terms of economics but also in terms of prestige, in terms of having them in your own collections. And it's only much, much later that there's a sense in which extinction becomes this notion that extinction is preceded by a period of being threatened or endangered that can be arrested, becomes established, so that the notion of conservation of species or trying to save them emerges. And that's partly because of these collectors, but also hunters. Hunters such as William Temple Hornaday are very, very concerned at the loss of the beasts that they prize so much. You know, things like the lions and the elephants. And so on in Africa, or whether it's the bison in America. And so there's often. They're often called penitent butchers by people at the time. This sense that all these people who've been butchering these animals are suddenly warning against the loss of these animals. And it's often ornithologists as well, because they, you know, bird watching, if you pay close attention to the skies, means you can see extinction in real time and endangerment. And ornithologists are growing increasingly worried about the trade in feathers, for instance, and use in fashions and stuff like that. So some of the earliest conservation attempts are actually to try and stop birds being killed for feathers, for fashionable uses, for instance. And so there's this kind of coalition and coalescence of interests in the late 19th century through to the early 20th century, which starts to imagine endangerment not just as something that happens, but as something that can be stalled and that it's valuable and important to do so and to intervene.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's starting to sound more familiar. I mean, even some of these campaigns around kind of the use of animals and fashion, for instance, and there's still, of course, debates today about hunting. So is this sort of moment of groups coming together in these different groups, is this how we get not just the idea that endangerment is a process and one that can be potentially paused or stopped, Is this also where we get the kind of categorization, ways of thinking it? Like today we have, you know, these ones are on this list that are more endangered than that list is. Is that where this comes from?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
That's slightly later. And there is a sense early in is very much threatened species or extinct species right up until potentially even the Second World War. And it's really after the Second World War, there are attempts to try and classify species and the degree of threats to which they are facing earlier. But because of the Second World War, those kind of attempts peter out. And it's really after 1948 that there is a huge meeting at Lake Success in. In the States where there's the newly established International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which establishes the idea of listing animals as a kind of formal listing of animals. And originally it's about 1314 mammals and 1314 birds. I can't remember which way around it is. And so there's these two lists that are circulated of threatened species. And then slowly those lists start growing, not only in terms of number, but also in terms of degrees of threat. So we're quite used to thinking of species as, for instance, perhaps critically endangered or threatened or vulnerable. And those are all categories that emerge after the Second World War through the efforts of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and through this mechanism of listing. Originally, those lists are published as what are called red books, which are actually originally like little red binders, which some. Some of your kind of older listeners might remember from school, before everything became digital. And then eventually it's published books. But of course now it's a digital list that anyone can go online and look at.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay. So, you know, called a red list for a reason. So that's interesting always to understand where those sorts of origins are. Of course, part of the debate as well today is about those lists, but it's also about de extinction. So where do we start to see those sorts of debates coming in? Or were those similar debates back then versus the ones we're having now?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
So it depends on how you define de extinction, because there's lots of ways you can either think of it as something that includes rewilding, which might be restoring animals to their homes where they've been previously. And there's lots of attempts to reintroduce species very early on. But in recent years, this idea that you can bring back something that has been completely lost, not just something that's locally extinct, like the beaver or bison in the uk, for instance, or lynx, you know, but. But actually something that has been. That was thought lost forever, whether it's the passenger pigeon or the mammoth. And that is very much a much, much more recent idea. And there are attempts. So after the Second World War, scientists realized that they can. They have figured out techniques for freezing tissues, animal tissues. If you've ever, like, left a cucumber in the freezer, you will know it just turns to slime when it. When it defrosts. So you can imagine if you're trying to freeze living tissue, that's going to be absolutely pointless. But then what scientists discover is that by adding a little bit of glycerol to living tissue, that you can not only freeze them, but thaw them without damage, because those ice crystals that cause that damage don't develop. And very, very quickly. That technique is taken up by various people who are concerned about conservation, most obviously Kurt Benischka at the San Diego Zoo, who wants to establish what we now call the frozen zoo. So he starts harvesting all these samples from everything that dies in the zoo, gives birth and so on. And the hope is that one day these frozen samples will enable some kind of conservation. And initially, the attempts to do that are very much along the lines of cloning animals. So the most obvious example would be Celia, the pyrenean ibex. She's said to be the last of her kind. And before she dies, she has samples taken from her of her genome that are frozen, that are then cloned later and through hundreds of kinds of embryos being created and kind of transplanted into surrogate goats. Eventually, one live kid is born. This little kid is a direct clone of Celia, but never survives. Only is alive for about seven minutes. And afterwards they're shown that there's a lung defect. So in some ways that could be called a de extinction because she's a direct clone of her mother. But there are others who would say that isn't a de extinction at all because she never plays any kind of ecological role. So there is that option for de extinction as well as things like rewilding. But then the things that tend to hit the headlines, stuff like the recent furore over the direwolves or passenger pigeons or mammoths aren't actually bringing back anything that has ever been alive. They're creating new life forms. So with the direwolves, for instance, all that happened was that there were gray wolf genomes that were edited to make them look like direwolves. But those. Those were new ways of being that had never existed. But they were called the direwolves because, of course, that is a profoundly effective tool to appeal to our emotions and our grief and our sense of loss. For us to feel that we are resurrecting these kind of lost ways of being.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So given the research you've done on this, what do you kind of hope people today consider when they're discussing this sort of topic? I mean, as you said, it's a very live issue, but often one that kind of is about headlines and immediate reckons, whereas you've done, you know, proper research and writing on it. So what do you maybe wish people would think about more when this topic comes up?
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Professor Sadia Qureshi
We need to stop thinking of many of the promises of de extinction as about resurrecting the past or recreating the past, because that's not really what's going to happen. And I think we really need to start thinking about it in terms of the future that we want to create. And even people who are heavily involved in de extinction and who are enthusiasts about it will say that they want to establish a world in which children do not grow up feeling sad, for instance. And so this is an attempt to imagine a future world in which our relationship to life and which our relationship to extinction is very, very different. And that is not just a future in terms of possibilities or emotional healing, but actually through establishing new ways of being. So, for instance, if the most most famous example of this is the mammoth, if that ever happens, it will not be a mammoth. What will happen is that there will be bits of mammoth DNA that have been identified as potentially, say, producing hairy elephants that are resistant to cold, being spliced into the genome of living elephants, and then giving birth to this kind of bioengineered hybrid animal that has never existed before with these traits, but it will be called a mammoth, because, you know, as I say, that's an effective form of campaigning, but that's not recreating the past, that's establishing new ways of life. And actually, I think we need to think about, if this is about creating futures, are those futures worthwhile, not just for us, but actually for these animals and beings? So, yes, it might make us feel better about our sense of grief and loss over things that we feel responsible for, you know, persecuting into extinction, but is that enough for those beings to actually still have a life on their own terms and have a life that's worth living? And I think it's also a really, really important question to ask. Should we rely or should we prioritize a technological fix for our grief without actually addressing some of the most important underlying concerns about how we have got there? And that's our exploitative relationship to life and nature. And I think offering that technological fix can seem like it's offering hope, but really what it's doing is allowing us to evade responsibility, evade grief, so that we can make ourselves feel better without actually addressing the deeply troubling ways that we treat life on Earth.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think those are some very important questions indeed for people to be thinking about. Is there anything that can be learnt on this topic or kind of anything else in terms of the bigger question of our relationship with nature? For example, from conservation efforts that have been successful in the last hundred years
- [35:01]
Professor Sadia Qureshi
or so, I think we've seen an extraordinary range of successful examples that have depended on giving space back to, or giving opportunities back to ways of being that were either locally extinct or declining. And I think, you know, some of the most extraordinary examples are in our skies, such as the resurgence of peregrine falcons, for instance, in. In the States or Wales, Whales are some of the most important ones, and they're a really good example because in the late 19th century, people did have a sense that whales were becoming much, much rarer, but that didn't necessarily lead to conservation measures in the way that we might expect. But there was definitely a sense that collecting whales for natural history museums and so on was a good thing because it was capturing these increasingly rare beasts. But then after the Second World War and during the Cold War, as people start thinking, using lots of different sound technologies, for instance, to explore the world, people realize that whales can do things like sing songs, you know, they make sounds, and the sounds of the humpback Whales becomes this extraordinarily successful record. And it's things like that that allow conservationists to start arguing that we should save the whales, not just because they're a profit resource, which is what some of the earliest attempts to manage whale populations are about, but actually because they deserve to be whales and deserve to live. And so what we see is this shift in the reasons why we conserve species, from thinking of them as important economic resources to allowing them to live as they are. And I think the other really good example of that is birds of prey. So, for instance, where I live, I often see buzzards in the sky or occasionally a red K. And decades ago, that would. That would have been inconceivable. And when I go back to, you know, where I was at university, there are peregrines in the sky, which again, would have been inconceivable when I was an undergraduate. And so there is a way to create space for ways of being to come back and to take up space that they did historically, that we have reached. We've, you know, where we've contributed to habitat loss and stuff that I think provide hope. But I think one of the reasons, not only that they are successful, these kinds of stories, is not just that those ways of being are allowed or being given space to be as they are, won't to be, but it's because of. We are doing it out of respect rather than trying to create a sustainable, natural, sustainable population of these species to harvest. And I think the Wales is the best example of that. And I think that's a much more successful and much more ethically kind of desirable reason to do that, because those, those species are able to live a life, you know, that is much closer to what they have evolved to be, rather than us interfering with them.
- [38:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I think that's a wonderfully optimistic note to end our discussion about the book. But as a final question for the interview, is there anything you're currently working on, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's related to what we've been discussing that you'd like to give us a sneak preview of.
- [38:29]
Professor Sadia Qureshi
So I'm taking my time before I write the next book.
- [38:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fair enough.
- [38:34]
Professor Sadia Qureshi
But I know it will be. It will be about migration and diaspora and about my own family history.
- [38:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, certainly sounds like a lot to enjoy investigating. And of course, you've done a lot of investigating and piecing things together in the book we've been discussing. So for anyone who wants more details, it was published by Penguin in 2025 and is titled Vanished An Unnatural History of Extinction. Sadia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [39:02]
Professor Sadia Qureshi
Thank you so much, Miranda. And thank you for everyone. To everyone for listening.
- [39:06]
New Books Network Host
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- [39:47]
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