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In the rolling hills of southern Spain, among the cork oaks and scrubland, lives a cat that should not exist anymore. Two decades ago, the Iberian lynx was sliding towards oblivion. Fewer than a hundred remained in the wild, scattered in a couple of fragile pockets, the last survivors of a species that had once ranged across the whole peninsula. It held a grim distinction. The most endangered cat on the planet, expected by many to become the first wild cat to go extinct in mo

Deep inside a mountain in East Africa, in total darkness, an elephant is mining. It is not a metaphor. On the slopes of an ancient volcano, elephants walk deep into caves that burrow far into the rock, feeling their way through the blackness, and there they dig at the cave walls with their tusks, breaking off chunks of stone to eat. Generation after generation, for who knows how long, these elephants have descended into the earth to mine the very rock for the minerals it hold

There are animals you can travel the whole world and find in only a single place. Not rare in the sense of being few in number, though they often are that too. Rare in the sense of being found nowhere else. A creature that exists on one island, in one forest, in one lake, and across the entire rest of the planet, not at all. Step beyond its small home, and it simply does not occur. It never has. These animals are called endemic to their place, and they are among the most fasc