'A billionaire would pay a lot of money to shoot a recreated woolly mammoth' Sadiah Qureshi on extinction and empire

In her new book, Vanished, the historian of science traces the roots of how we treat life, whether living, endangered, dead or extinct

- Maya Goodfellow

Would you bring an extinct species back to life if you could? If so, which species would you pick?

Prof Sadiah Qureshi has taken to asking her friends, students and complete strangers this question because, she says, their answers reveal a lot about how we understand extinction.

Some choose a dinosaur, others pick a species like the dodo, killed off by humans. Almost no one chooses a plant or insect.

The very idea of de-extinction, Qureshi has said, raises profound questions about the meaning of extinction and how we treat life, whether living, endangered, dead or extinct. How, she asks, did human beings come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish for ever?

This is the subject of her new book, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, which traces the entanglements of race, empire and colonialism to better understand extinction.

"Every time we save a way of being or mourn the passing of a natural kind, whether a species or otherwise, we make decisions rooted in our emotional attachments, or our perceptions of that natural kind's value - whether commercial, aesthetic or ecological," she writes. Extinction is not simply a scientific puzzle, Qureshi has argued - it is political and philosophical.

Qureshi grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham, and was taught by her father to respect all living beings - a conviction that underpins the book and that we keep coming back to during our conversation, which takes place as we perch on one of the large rocks that line the garden of the Natural History Museum in London.