As scientists are now essentially in agreement that the last 400 years of human impact have pushed the Earth into a crisis called the Sixth Mass Extinction, the question of life and death takes on new meaning with troubling urgency. The Dodo is considered to be the first animal to have been exterminated as a consequence of European colonialism in Madagascar in the sixteenth century (Grove 1996, p. 145 and following); yet, since 1900, close to 500 vertebrate species have become extinct. According to a study by the World Wildlife Fund, the number of wild animals has halved in the last forty years alone. This is tragic news for beloved species such as elephants, rhinoceros, orangutans, and tigers, but it is no less violent for less admired animals such as vultures and dung beetles. Since a diminished evolutionary gene pool can be detrimental for surviving epidemics, the American evolutionary biologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson has urged that half of the Earth should be abandoned by humans to allow for the regeneration of non-human biodiversity. Even if Wilson's claim must be read as a provocation rather than a feasible solution, in the context of exacerbated and irreversible destruction of habitat around the world, especially in hotspots of tropical biodiversity, we decided to consider zoological specimen collections as evidence of the “slow violence” of the Anthropocene (Nixon 2011).