With more than two hundred richly colored, painstakingly detailed antique illustrations, Lost Fish offers a chance to meditate on the dazzling beauty of marine life before it is too late. Culled from rare ­nineteenth-century scientific volumes, these stunning prints testify to the curiosity about the natural world, which spurred legendary writers to expound on the beauty of creation and naturalists like Linnaeus, Buffon, and his successor, the Comte de Lacepede, to catalogue the species around them. Today, only the very deepest crevasses of the ocean elude us. But many of these species so meticulously enumerated by Lacepde are lost forever, or pushed to the brink of extinction, put at risk by the changing climate of the planet. Acclaimed environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert provides an introduction that elucidates the perils facing the ocean today a fate inextricably linked with our own.

With more than two hundred richly colored, painstakingly detailed antique illustrations, Lost Fish offers a chance to meditate on the dazzling beauty of marine life before it is too late. Culled from rare ­nineteenth-century scientific volumes, these stunning prints testify to the curiosity about the natural world, which spurred legendary writers to expound on the beauty of creation and naturalists like Linnaeus, Buffon, and his successor, the Comte de Lacepede, to catalogue the species around them. Today, only the very deepest crevasses of the ocean elude us. But many of these species so meticulously enumerated by Lacepde are lost forever, or pushed to the brink of extinction, put at risk by the changing climate of the planet. Acclaimed environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert provides an introduction that elucidates the perils facing the ocean today a fate inextricably linked with our own.