Lost Wonders by Tom Lathan (Picador £18.99, 448 pp)

In December 1971, two visitors to Pinta Island in the Galapagos came face to face with a creature that was not supposed to exist.

It was a species of giant tortoise that had been declared extinct almost 70 years earlier. Now he was back from the dead.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. The turtle, nicknamed “Lonesome George,” became a media celebrity but was the last of his species. When it died in June 2012, the giant tortoise of Pinta Island effectively disappeared.

As Tom Lathan makes clear in this elegiac and timely book, we live in an age of extinction. And humans are largely to blame. Extinctions occur today nearly a thousand times more often than they did in the 60 million years before humans arrived.

Everyone knows stories of extinct species in the past, like the dodo. Lathan focuses on ten people who went missing during this century.

There is a microsnail the size of a sesame seed that lived only on a hill called Bukit Panching in Malaysia. Not only does the snail no longer exist, but neither does Bukit Panching. Quarrying began there in

the 1980s and the hill is now gone. In Lathan’s words, “it took hundreds of millions of years to build, but only a few dozen to destroy.”

Of course, a species limited to a small habitat sees its chances of survival considerably reduced. Bramble Cay is a small island in the Torres Strait, the size of three Trafalgar Squares, in the Great Barrier Reef.

All alone: ​​Lonesome George was the last living turtle on Pinta Island, after his death the subspecies became extinct

The Bramble Cay melomys – a small rodent described as “the only mammal species endemic to the Great Barrier Reef” – once inhabited the island. When HMS Bramble arrived on the island in 1845 and gave it its name, there were hundreds of melomys. The crew used them for archery practice.

The species has not been observed since 2009 and is presumed extinct.

Like all the creatures in Lathan’s book, the Bramble Cay melomys has been the target of desperate attempts by conservationists to save it. Some of them were struck by bad luck. The po’ouli was a Hawaiian bird only discovered in 1973. It soon became clear that it would need us to play Cupid if it wanted to survive.

Their numbers were down to three when the last individuals were taken from the wild to breed in captivity.

There were thought to be two men and one woman, but closer examination revealed that all three were men.

Lost Wonders is often a sad book. Lathan interviews an environmentalist who is only willing to talk about the Christmas Island pipistrelle – a small bat weighing the equivalent of four raisins that she tried, unsuccessfully, to save – if she can get some tissues within reach.

However, while Lost Wonders serves as a stark warning, it also gives hope that we can do something to prevent further extinctions.