The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure: 'A rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson

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They have iridescent throats, and are just five and a half centimetres long – barely the length of a finger. But with gilt-edged pages and illustrations by Talya Baldwin, Rundell’s book presents the wonderful things it contains with the tactile attractiveness of a children’s book. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The Morpho butterfly, for instance, has a sweep of blue across its wings so bright and so complex we haven’t yet been able to replicate it; it’s thought to use its iridescence to communicate with other Morpho butterflies over long distances, using its wings to reflect ultraviolet light.

Even more disturbingly, Rundell argues that extinction is “not just happening because of our inertia: it’s incentive-driven” – through a ghastly process known as “extinction speculation”. KR: In a dream world – I don’t think this will ever happen – I’ve never seen a hummingbird (there are none in Europe: people who think they’ve seen one have usually seen a hummingbird hawk moth) so I would love to go to Cuba to see the Bee Hummingbird – the smallest bird in the world, which weighs less than two grams. Simonetta hunted for the living version, promising children a shilling for every specimen produced, but none was forthcoming, and the only record of its life is his 29-page paper, ‘A New Golden Mole from Somalia with an Appendix on the Taxonomy of the Family Chrysochloridae’. She also explains how our way of living has already forced countless species into extinction, and how many more are in a highly precarious situation. Katherine also shares her favourite fictonal stories about animals, including a reading from The Sheep Pig by Dick King-Smith.It was once proposed that storks “wintered on the moon”; we couldn’t have imagined that a mere two centuries later their wings would reveal the key to human fight. Rundell is indeed a children’s author and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal; the book is indeed charming.

This tiny jawbone, barely larger than a thumbnail clipping, did not match that of any other known mole, and so the Calcochloris tytonis– the Somali golden mole – was added to the species list . I longed for mapo tofu, and their dry fried green beans, and hotpots so spicy they set your whole face alight. Not just the Principe scops-owl, native to a West African island with a human population of less than 8,000, but a new type of water shrew in the British Isles.A family of barn owls had been living in it, and inside one of the pellets, Simonetta found the assorted bones of a golden mole; including the ‘right ramus of the lower jaw’. In portraits her face has the expression of one who has seen a great deal and would prefer to burn most of it. A lavishly illustrated compendium of the staggering lives of some of the world's most endangered animals, The Golden Mole is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck – to fall for the likes of the wondrous Pygmy Hippo, the seahorse, the narwhal and, as astonishing and endangered as them all, the human.

ASIDE from light bruising to the top of the spine, which can ONLY be seen if you remove the jacket, the book is Very Fine with straight spine, sharp corners and firm spine ends. They will see us pass through our current spinning apocalypse, and the crash that will come after it, and they will see the currently unimagined things that will come after that. The bone in the mole’s middle ear is so large and hypertrophied that it is immensely sensitive to underground vibrations; waiting under the soil or sand, the golden mole can hear the footsteps up above of birds and lizards; it can distinguish between the footfall of ants and termites. The page edges are sprayed red and the red boards are stencilled with a design unique to this edition.

Her new book, The Golden Mole, gathers those essays and new pieces into a bestiary of unusual and underappreciated creatures. It was careful and precise with language, grim as well as funny – a sort of Famous Five meets Heart of Darkness – and, crucially, didn’t speak down to its tween readers. We know very little about any golden mole, but about the Somali golden mole we know nothing at all; not what colour it is, nor whether it’s quietly abundant in some small and as yet unsurveyed patch of land, nor if the owl ate the last one.

With their powerful forelegs and webbed back feet, they are described by scientists as ‘spectacularly autapomorphic’.The Golden Mole is a celebration of 22 species, each of which is either endangered or “contains a subspecies that is endangered”. The first lemur I ever met was female, and she tried to bite me, which was fair, because I was trying to touch her, and because humans have done nothing to recommend themselves to lemurs.