Witness to Extinction How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin

by Turvey, Samuel

• ISBN13: 9780199549474
• ISBN10: 0199549478
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The baiji, the Yangtze River dolphin, a beautiful slender creature long celebrated in stories along the Chinese river, is gone forever. Everyone knew it was at risk, and much was made of the threat of extinction. Urgent appeals for effective international action were made time and time again. Too late.

Author Biography

Samuel Turvey is Research Fellow at the Institute of Zoology, a department of the Zoological Society of London. He is a conservation biologist with a principal interest in the history and prehistory of human-caused extinctions and in developing conservation strategies for today's threatened species. He was deeply involved with the conservation efforts surrounding the Yangtze River dolphin, and was the lead author of the 2007 paper in Biology Letters which declared that it was probably extinct, generating tremendous international media attention. He has published numerous other academic papers in a range of scientific journals, including Nature.

Table of Contents

Author's Note	p. ix
Prologue	p. x
The Beginning
The Goddess of the Yangtze	p. 3
The Amazon of the East	p. 17
The Aquatic Panda	p. 41
East Meets West	p. 54
The End
The Rarest Animal in the World	p. 83
The Politics of Extinction	p. 111
End Game	p. 135
The Hunting of the Snark	p. 147
The Golden Channel	p. 164
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fishing	p. 178
What Have We Learnt? Collected Fictions	p. 197
Epilogue: And Then There Was One	p. 206
Suggested Reading	p. 211
Notes	p. 215
Acknowledgements	p. 222
About the Author	p. 225
Index	p. 226
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