"Kyle Harper's intertwining of human and animal histories, illustrated with so many revealing episodes, is a tremendous accomplishment. It is hard to overstate the cumulative power of the story that unfolds across the book. This is a history that we desperately need to grasp and begin to change." --Sean B. Carroll, author of The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters "Filled with fascinating detail, this book provides a sense of how one species--ours--has shifted the destiny of so many others simply by our (in so many ways extravagant) existence. On the edge of the climate change era, it positions our possibilities and our peril." --Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization " The Last Animal gives us the long view that conservation urgently needs. Harper traces how human history became ecological history, transforming animals, landscapes, and seascapes, and the systems that sustain life.

Brilliantly synthetic and deeply thoughtful, this book reminds us that biodiversity is not a backdrop to human progress; it is the living foundation of our own future." --Becky Chaplin-Kramer, global biodiversity lead scientist, World Wildlife Fund "Illuminating and sharply written, Harper's book blends natural science with history in ways that very few historians and fewer natural scientists are able to do." --J. R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Modern World " The Last Animal is utterly dazzling. It is the mark of a great historian to render the full complexity of the past without reducing it to a simple parable of good guys versus bad guys. Harper's talent for both appreciation and analysis lifts this book above the indignant tenor of much of today's debates about the environmental crisis and its myriad causes. He shows that there is something beautiful and benign as well as brutal in us.

" --Julia Adeney Thomas, coauthor of The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach "Big history at its best, The Last Animal dissects our collision with the biodiversity of the natural world from the Pleistocene to today. With beautiful writing and vivid descriptions, Kyle Harper has given us a rich mix of biology, anthropology, and history, uncovering forgotten characters and poorly known avenues in this captivating story of our history en route to our modern world. The book to read on the Anthropocene." --Douglas H. Erwin, curator of paleozoic invertebrates, National Museum of Natural History.