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A monument can stand for five thousand years and be damaged forever in a single careless second. A hand dragged across an ancient carving. A name scratched into a temple wall. A fragment slipped into a pocket as a souvenir. A crowd pressing where a crowd should never press. The deep past survived the rise and fall of empires, the end of the Ice Age, the loss of whole civilisations, only to arrive in our hands at the most dangerous moment of all, the age of mass travel, when m

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