In late 2014, conservationist Ian Gynther lost hope. After days spent crawling into rock crevices, scouring through camera-trap footage, and carefully laying bait around Bramble Cay—a tiny island at the northern end of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—there was little room for doubt. The Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), a furry little rodent endemic to the island, had gone extinct. “My colleagues and I were devastated,” Gynther, a senior conservation officer at Queensland’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, later told The Guardian. “As each day of our comprehensive survey passed without revealing any trace of the animal, we became more and more depressed.”
The disappearance of the Bramble Cay melomys became a grim milestone in the history of conservation biology. Its extinction report, published in 2016, determined the cause of death to be anthropogenic climate change, the first such attribution for a mammalian species.1 The rodents’ home had been battered ...
