First encounters: the armoured diggers

Almost nobody knows what a pangolin is - even the description 'scaly anteater' usually causes bemused looks. It's not like they haven't been familiar in Europe for hundreds of years.But the creatures they came from remained enigmatic. The first accounts of pangolins written by Europeans give a clue as to why.

Raising Lazarus: the exoticism of extinction

Why do we want to bring extinct animals back from the dead? We already know how to play jiggsaw with genomes, roll out herds of clones, or store the biosphere's blueprints in gene banks, but resurrection or de-extinction is the ultimate reconstruction.