Animal Archives at the End of the World

“We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

– Umberto Eco, in an interview with Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris for SPIEGEL, 2009¹

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Across the various scales of planetary time, humans have participated in, and borne witness to, the disappearance of other species with whom we cohabitate in this world. As more animals find themselves at the brink of extinction, humanity’s desire to preserve an aspect of their existence has only grown. In the absence of their living bodies in the landscape, some kind of image or token of their representation attempts to fill that ecological void.  This impulse to document the loss of non-humans has taken many forms: collections of feather, bone, and scales; hunting and preserving whole specimens; audio recordings and video footage; field reporting and administrative documents; and visualisations in the form of paintings, sketches, prints, or photography. Frequently, the people who undertake these recordings don’t consider that their subjects are at risk of endangerment or extinction and the role that their work plays within these disappearances. Of the 489 birds naturalist John James Audubon depicted for his 1827-1838 series Birds of America, five went extinct in the decades after he painted them and after his own death.² The human impulse to observe, preserve, and categorize in the name of understanding local and global biodiversity overrides the desire to conserve and protect.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, as Western colonial and industrial expansion wreaked havoc on ecosystems around the world, methods like taxidermy emerged as an early form of the animal archive used by scientific institutions to document the planet’s biodiversity, preserve rare specimens for research collections, and advance early efforts at environmental conservation. In our pursuit of extending their epistemological life, many species met their biological death. Their remnants lived on to be painted (as in the case of Audubon), stuffed, mounted, photographed, and deposited in glass display cases or cabinet drawers. Despite efforts of Western institutions to establish a ‘global’ scientific authority over these ‘unknown’ exotic landscapes, these archival practices were done with little regard for local land relations and Indigenous rights, and disregarded less lethal forms of species documentation that may have been previously used in these non-Western communities. Donna Haraway articulates this paradox best in “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” her essay about American taxidermists’ hunting expeditions to build natural history museum collections.³ As Haraway notes: “Once domination is complete, conservation is urgent. But perhaps preservation comes too late.”⁴

In 2022, I began calling these formal and informal libraries of zoological information “animal archives.” These archives are physical or digital collections of preserved specimens and their biological data. Some are created as academic resources with institutional backing, some by conservation groups to study endangered species and advocate for environmental policy changes, while others were produced through more artistic, rather than purely scientific, means. These animal archives are where we can learn about a species’ past and present; sites where, even as those we study have reached their own end, we can navigate our future in the ongoing turbulence of the Anthropocene.

My goal in this creative academic research endeavor was not just to look at the sheer volume of collected data and biological information in these archives. Rather, I’m interested in how stories of extinction are told through these archives, how choices to represent these non-human subjects through interpretive narratives, database design, and artistic expression elicit reactions from those who interact with these archives and offer us alternative ways of comprehending this overwhelming moment of mass extinction, endangerment, and grief.

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Tucked away on the third floor of the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution in Paris is a dimly-lit room that houses an usual collection of natural history. Called La Salle des Espèces Menacées et des Espèces Disparues (The Room of Endangered and Extinct Species), this gallery holds 257 taxidermy specimens collected by the museum from the early 20th century that have since gone extinct, are only found in captivity, or remain endangered.⁵ Visitors to the gallery have described the collection of extinct and endangered animals as haunting. Species such as the Xerces Blue Butterfly, the Sumatran Tiger, and the Saint Lucia Giant Rice Rat are displayed in varying states of taxidermic completion. Relics of the evolving art of preservation at the turn of the century, their partial and imperfectly choreographed arrangements of limbs, fur, and wings sit in a state of arrested decay.

Despite the fact that the origins of taxidermy are infused with a belief in anthropocentric domination and extraction, the idea that documenting aspects of endangered or extinct species in order to share its story with an invested public persists within conservation practices and research today. Each of these taxidermy collections were motivated by quests (oftentimes in nations actively being colonized) to find the most ideal specimen of a particular species, even if the decision to participate in hunting accelerated the mass extinction of many animals already threatened by big game hunting, growing economies of wildlife trade, or the permanent displacement from their natural habitats. In this way, taxidermy can be understood as the most violent gesture in these animal archives. As Haraway writes, “In the upside down world of Teddy Bear Patriarchy, it is in the craft of killing that life is constructed.”⁶ The hope was that, even if one particular species didn’t survive, its staged remains would advance the field of natural history and spur visitors to these institutions to support greater habitat protection and restrictions on animal trades nationally and abroad. Yet, taxidermy’s historic role holds questions that haunt us to this day: Who were these archives intended for? Who do they actually benefit? How was their collecting influenced by political, economic, and cultural priorities of the time? What was the cost of acquiring these animal remains and keeping knowledge of their existence alive?

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With the rise of new technologies for documenting individual species and their genetic, biological, and geospatial information in the late 20th century, the animal archive evolved from taxidermied and preserved specimens into complex repositories of data accumulated primarily by academic institutions, conservation groups, zoo researchers, and citizen scientists.

As anxieties around biodiversity loss grew, the IUCN Red List was created by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1964 as a global biodiversity database for tracking progress in environmental conservation and ecological threats among individual species from their headquarters in the United Kingdom.⁷ Today, the IUCN estimates that about 28% (or 42,100) of the species they’ve assessed are at severe risk of extinction.⁸ The Red List fascinates me because of its ambitious scope and the impossibility of its completion. Each entry features an animal’s taxonomy; a map of its recorded habitat; estimated population; and other social, economic, and political factors that determine its status along the IUCN’s spectrum from ‘Not Evaluated’ and ‘Data Deficient’ to ‘Extinct’ (and every level of threat and endangerment in between).⁹ Browse their website and you’ll notice that not every entry is kept up-to-date. Some species might be featured more prominently than others due to broader scientific interest, international trade priorities, or cultural value. Meanwhile other entries lack key data points, missing geographic information or species descriptions due to gaps in the IUCN’s research, indicative of both the European-based organization’s own Western bias in national and local data collection as well as systemic issues of underrepresentation and underfunding of conservation science in areas across Central and South America, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Southeast Asia.¹⁰

Extinction studies scholar Ursula K. Heise writes that “Red Lists of endangered species can be understood as a new variant of the modern epic or world text and as a new form of nature writing: the forever incomplete attempt to map the entirety of biological life and classify it according to its risk of extinction, as part and parcel of a battle of heroic scientists and conservations against ignorant authorities and indifferent masses.”¹¹ Caught between Enlightenment ideas of encyclopedic knowing and, as Heise puts it, “the hyperlinked, centrifugal architecture of the Internet,” digital biodiversity databases such as the IUCN Red List are not as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ tools of science as one might assume.¹² To consolidate and make accessible the enormous volume of different types of data that determine each animal’s status requires creative intervention. As human destruction, changing weather patterns, and altered habitats drive more species into the IUCN’s critical categories of endangerment and extinction, we might ask how their stories, their lived experiences, and their histories of inhabiting this world might be better represented by these conservation catalogs.

Biological materials and geospatial information aren’t the only kinds of animal data an institution can collect. Since 1929, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library has compiled a comprehensive ecoacoustic archive of audio recordings, photographs, and video footage from over 10,000 bird species.¹³ As the library has grown over time, it also became an unintended repository for some of the last recordings of extinct birds, including the Bachman’s Warbler and the Kauai O’o. These animal archives are far from static. Shaped not just by new additions to the collection but by the passage of time, they become dynamic, permeable mirrors of our environment’s past, present, and future.

Unlike many other biodiversity archives, The Macaulay Library has opened itself up for public use, welcoming citizen scientists, institutional researchers, and artists alike to use and contribute to their multimedia collections.¹⁴ Aware of the need to bring in other collaborators who can better access avian ecosystems around the world, the library now provides guidelines for birdwatchers and audio technicians to submit their own recordings, aiding in filling knowledge gaps and strengthening the collection. Musicians and artists such as Elizabeth Turk have also taken these soundbites of endangered or extinct birds and transformed them into new creative works that bring attention to the loss of our global bird population.¹⁵ By introducing these new perspectives, this animal archive is no longer a passive form of recordkeeping, but rather a way of sparking moments of accessible public education and engaging in important scientific dialogues about the future of animal conservation.

In a time where these kinds of databases offer unprecedented visibility into population decline and extinction, presenting empirical data alone is insufficient. Incorporating historical narratives, information about a species’ social and cultural significance, artworks inspired by their lives, and stories about how they have moved through their habitats enables us to understand these animals as more than a statistic or a singular catalogued specimen. As Heise notes in her book Imagining Extinction, a species’ extinction is not a linear event, but rather a complex web of human and non-human factors.¹⁶ Even so, the aesthetic construction of the database, its style of cataloging and categorization, should not be discarded entirely. These repositories of quantitative and biological information offer valuable entry points for grappling with ecological loss, locating emotional resonances of grief and narratives of decline within the archive’s numerical sublime.

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What happens, then, when artists take the act of constructing an animal archive into their own hands? In 2009, Maya Lin began production for her project What is Missing?. ¹⁷ This dynamic memorial, consisting of both physical artworks and an interactive website, is dedicated to extinct species and those who are likely to disappear in our lifetime. In an interview with Artforum, Lin states that, “For me, memorials have never been about loss, or about the past for the sake of the past. They’re teaching tools; they’re educational. They ask if we can reflect on our past in order to help guide us to a different future.”¹⁸ Lin’s intention for What is Missing? is to depict humanity’s ongoing relationship with our environment, the interwoven journeys we have taken towards conservation and destruction from local areas to global webs. This multispecies odyssey spans anthropocentric, non-human, and geological timescales, tapping into difficult entanglements of growth, interconnection, exploitation, and death.

How Lin visually represents this ambitious project is important in that it challenges dominant archival conventions of neatly organized databases and lists. Users begin by clicking on different ‘paths’ through these environmental histories and non-human stories. Users are also invited to contribute their own memories of a lost animal or threatened ecosystem. Where many animal archives are concerned with maintaining an authoritative and thorough documentation of the past and growing their collections in the present, Lin’s archival memorial also draws our attention to the future. Despite the website’s ominous opening message that “By 2100 50% of all species may face extinction,” the sections ‘What If?’ and ‘Solutions’ offer respites for optimistic speculation despite our pervasive feeling of apocalyptic grief.¹⁹

In a similar push to establish a memorial dedicated to biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene, the Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO) was proposed in 2013 as the world’s first extinction museum. Designed by Adjaye Associates for a cavernous site on the Isle of Portland in England, renderings of MEMO appeared as equal parts natural history museum, library, and temple, leading visitors down a spiraling path of galleries dedicated to 860 extinct species.²⁰ MEMO was meant to act as an exhibition hall, an ecological information center, and a place for contemplation, inspiring reflections on historical and contemporary threats to biodiversity and making space for grieving the animals who have already gone. Although the project was rebranded in 2022 to the Eden Project Portland, an underground cathedral for biodiversity research, I wonder what will remain of MEMO’s original goal of providing a cohesive narrative of extinction through an immersive archive of animal stories.²¹

Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose reminds us that life and death are forever intertwined in “multispecies knots” of evolution and extinction.²² Just as each of these creative projects grapple with the issue of time in loss and preservation, Bird notes that time can become an embodied agent in our ecological sense-making. These artistic interventions aren’t just recording histories of biodiversity. They are attending to the gaps, and they are uncovering what is absent in these databases. The animal archive can be a site of expanded understandings about extinction as more than a straightforward trajectory, but rather a series of complex interactions and nuanced transformations across generations of more-than-human existence. These archives enable us to bear witness to these legacies, to uncover new ways of living in and among the world just as much these databases depict dying in it.

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As biodiversity archives grow, collecting and quantifying the species of our world, they have become both deliberate and unintended witnesses to destructive extinction events brought on or exacerbated by human actions. These archives, cataloguers of life, now find themselves caught between the need to record what has already been lost and to document threatened species. Yet the value of the animal archive goes beyond merely being a repository for collected specimens, biological materials, and digitized multimedia. These archives invite us to contemplate alternative futures, to bring past histories of long-gone species to the present and transmit their stories across generations. Artist Caroline Sinders defines these types of creative interventions as “research-driven art.” In a piece for The Creative Independent, she notes that research-driven art “uses specific structures and a sense of purpose to constrain it…The art I make is less about accomplishing a goal, and more about exploring and uncovering a form of truth.”²³ The confines of the archival form, its capacity for data quantification, and its rigid systems of cataloguing and collecting can be reimagined as tools for creative experimentation.

These animal archives will forever be unfinished. There will always be species that go missing, are unaccounted for, or may go extinct long before they are ever recorded. Yet those absences, the embrace of the incomplete under the incomprehensible scope of extinction, play a critical role in expanding the possibilities of these animal archives. By opening up these archives for use by artists, incorporating more creative writing into data entry, creating platforms for public contributions, and rendering these extinct species more visible, we can foster deeper connections to those lost and threatened species. Even with those species not yet at the brink of extinction, these interventions teach us how to listen, to witness, to share their stories of resilience, adaptation, mutualism, migration, and resilience with the world. These animal archives, old and new, can provide us with scientific and artistic tools for articulating our grief in the face of extinction’s ongoing magnitude of loss. In accepting the invitation of these collections to see, interact, and remember the lives of these specimens, we can incorporate greater care into our interactions with the more-than-human world. Whether they are digital lists, taxidermy, audio recordings, or memorials, these animal archives are eco-historical records that can help us adapt to an apocalyptic world by mourning the past, situating the present, and embracing the entanglements of our collective interspecies future.

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Eleonor Botoman (she/they) is a poet-critic based in New York City. She currently is a graduate student in New York University’s Experimental Humanities (XE) program, studying environmental justice and climate resiliency in museum and art institutional curation, education, and infrastructure.

1. Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, “‘Unwiderstehlicher Zauber (Irresistible Magic),’” SPIEGEL, November 1, 2009, https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/unwiderstehlicher-zauber-a-b8ce11d9-0002-0001-0000-000067596419.
2. Ana Norman, “Extinct Species in Audubon’s Birds of America,” Joel Oppenheimer Gallery, June 15, 2023, https://www.audubonart.com/extinct-species-in-audubons-birds-of-america/.
3. Haraway focuses on Carl Akeley, whose hunting expeditions built the American Natural History Museum’s Hall of African Mammals and the way notions of gender hierarchy became imbued into his displays of wildlife ‘families.’ Akeley was not only obsessed with hunting down the perfect representative for each species, but also wanted to inspire visitors to support their conservation through emotionally affective encounters with these exotic animals.
4. Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” Social Text, no. 11 (1984): 20–64, 28, https://doi.org/10.2307/466593.
5. Allison Meier, “The Room of Endangered and Extinct Species,” Atlas Obscura, April 8, 2010, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-room-of-endangered-and-extinct-species.
6. Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” 23.
7. International Union for Conservation of Nature, “Background & History,” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, n.d., https://www.iucnredlist.org/about/background-history.
8. International Union for Conservation of Nature, “Background & History.”
9. International Union for Conservation of Nature, “Raw Data to Red List,” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, n.d., https://www.iucnredlist.org/assessment/process.
10. Steven P. Bachman et al., “Progress, Challenges and Opportunities for Red Listing,” Biological Conservation, 234 (2019): 45–55, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.03.002.
11. Ursula K. Heise, “From Arks to ARKive.Org: Database, Epic, and Biodiversity,” Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 55–86, 65-66.
12. Ursula K. Heise, “From Arks to ARKive.Org: Database, Epic, and Biodiversity,” 65.
13. Macaulay Library, “History,” The Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library, n.d., https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/about/history/.
14. Macaulay Library, “Resources,” The Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library, n.d., https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/resources/.
15. Marie Chappell, “Macaulay Library the Muse: An Exploration of Bird Song in Art,” The Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library, July 20, 2020, https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/2020/07/20/macaulay-library-the-muse-an-exploration-of-bird-song-in-art/.
16. Ursula K. Heise, “From Arks to ARKive.Org: Database, Epic, and Biodiversity,” 55–86.
17. Maya Lin, “What Is Missing? | About the Project,” What Is Missing? Foundation, 2009, https://www.whatismissing.org/about.
18. Annie Godfrey Larmon, “Maya Lin,” Artforum, December 2, 2014, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/maya-lin-discusses-what-is-missing-a-project-and-interactive-website-49297.
19. Maya Lin, “What Is Missing?,” What Is Missing? Foundation, 2009, https://www.whatismissing.org/.
20. David Adjaye, “MEMO (Mass Extinction Monitoring Observatory),” Adjaye Associates, June 2013, https://www.adjaye.com/work/memo-mass-extinction-monitoring-observatory/.
21. Eden Project, “Eden Project Portland, UK,” Eden Project, 2022, https://www.edenproject.com/new-edens/eden-project-portland-uk.
22. Deborah Bird Rose, “Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time.” Environmental Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2012): 127–140. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26169399.
23. Caroline Sinders, “How to Make Research-Driven Art,” The Creative Independent, August 16, 2018, https://thecreativeindependent.com/essays/how-to-make-research-driven-art/.

This article is published in issue 40.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue