The Greenland shark is the oldest vertebrate on the planet, able to live for hundreds of years in cold waters thousands of meters deep.
It also smells unique. His body is designed to have the same concentration of salt as the ocean – so that it neither loses nor gains water through osmosis – so it must have a high concentration of the waste product known as urea.
This makes its flesh toxic to humans when fresh, but it can be safely consumed if it is buried for several months to ferment and then hung to dry.
Some consider the resulting meat – known as Hákarl by the Greenlanders – a delicacy.
“Apparently it tastes like an overripe cheese left for a week in high summer in a teenage boy’s car,” writes Katherine Rundell in Lost Treasures: A Zoo of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures.
In the delightful new book, Rundell spotlights 20 creatures in as many essays, chronicling their strange habits and design as a sort of literary David Attenborough.
She explains that wombats are much faster than they look.
“Despite the fact that they don’t look simple, a wombat can run up to 25 miles per hour and maintain that speed for 90 seconds,” she writes.
By comparison, Usain Bolt has reached speeds of up to 27.8 miles per hour, but only held it for less than two seconds.
In another essay, we learn that giraffe sex is usually a male-to-male affair, with some researchers finding that up to 94% of giraffe intercourse is homosexual.
And, the long necks of the lanky creatures take a toll.
When giraffes lower their heads to drink water, blood rushes to their heads and the veins in their necks close to block blood to their brains so they don’t pass out when they raise their heads.
“It’s a dizzying thing to be a giraffe,” Rundell writes. “Even when the water is plentiful, they only drink every few days.”
Swift birds are unlike any other flying creature, eating and sleeping while in the air.
They are able to do the latter thanks to “unihemispheric sleep,” allowing them to shut off half of their brain at a time while the other half remains awake and keeps them awake.
“The bird wakes up exactly in the same place where it fell asleep; or, migrating, on the exact path he set himself,” writes Rundell.
In a single year, a swift flies approximately 124,000 miles – the equivalent of five trips around the Earth.
The highest speed officially recorded for swifts is 70 miles per hour, but more anecdotal reports have reached the birds at 105 miles per hour.
This is Rundell’s second book to be published in the US this year.
The 37-year-old author’s children’s fantasy novel “Impossible Creatures” was released in September and currently tops the New York Times middle grade bestseller list.
It has drawn breathless comparisons to JRR Tolkien and JK Rowling.
When it was published in the UK last year, it was named the best book – for all ages – of the year.
“Missing Treasures” is filled not only with intriguing facts, but also with beautiful and sharp turns of phrase.
Pangolins, Rundell writes, have “scales [that] are the same shade of gray-green as the sea in winter and the face of an extremely polite academic”
Wolves are the rare animal that communicates information using facial expressions, which Rundell quips can be roughly translated as “ears flat back and close to the head: tail between the legs: ‘Don Corleone, I’m honored and grateful you invited me I at your house on your daughter’s wedding day. And let their first child be a male child'”.
The book not only covers the behavior of animals in nature but also touches on the strange interactions between wild animals and humans.
A chapter on raccoons covers Rebecca, an adorable mask-faced creature who was given to President Calvin Coolidge in 1926 to cook for Thanksgiving.
Instead, the First Family kept the raccoon as a pet and dressed it as it saw fit.
“Dressed in her finery, she roams the White House, pulling out light bulbs and knocking houseplants out of their pots,” Rundell writes, noting that she was exiled from her fancy digs for a time. after biting Coolidge.
A more grim example in the essay on elephants shows how, in 1870 when the Prussians besieged Paris and blocked food supplies to the city, two of the zoo’s elephants were slaughtered and their meat sold to the rich.
Almost all of the creatures in the book are, or were at one point, endangered, and Rundell made a plea for readers to appreciate and protect the Earth.
“We have lost more than half of all wild things that have ever lived. We are Noah’s ark in reverse: as if we are raging through the bowels of the boat, setting fire to the stables, poisoning the water,” she writes. “The time to fight, with all our wits and tenacity, love and fury, is now.”
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