A new international collaborative project on extinction histories has been selected for funding by the Research Council of Norway and the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF). 

The project, Human-Environment-Animal Relations in Deep Time (HEART), explores the long history of human relationships with extinct wildlife in South Africa, tracing how animals have been hunted, collected, remembered and displayed over centuries of colonial and postcolonial change. 

Prof Sandra Swart of the African Anthropocenes Research Centre at Stellenbosch University (SU) will lead the South African component of the project. A specialist in animal and environmental history, she plays a central role in shaping HEART’s multispecies and decolonial approach, particularly its focus on Africa’s material animal heritage and the histories embedded in museum collections.

Bringing together environmental historians, artists, biologists, and museum curators, HEART seeks to develop innovative ways of telling long-term extinction stories and engaging publics with environmental loss. Central to the project is a commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and to rethinking how museums and heritage institutions narrate extinction across deep time, Swart explains. 

“History in Africa is a multi-species and more-than-human story of the continent,” she says. “A neglected part of African animal studies is its material heritage. There are intensifying calls for the return of artefacts, with European museums under mounting pressure to return the irreplaceable physical relics of the past.”

HEART addresses these debates by examining how extinct animals continue to matter through their remains, traces, and representations in museums – often far from the landscapes in which they once lived. The project explores questions of digital repatriation, environmental storytelling, and public engagement, asking how extinction can be made meaningful without flattening its historical and ethical complexity.

“Extinction is often treated as an end point, but for historians it is also a starting point – a way of asking how power, violence, care, and responsibility are distributed across species and across time. Museums are key sites where these questions become visible, and contestable,” says Swart.

The project is led by the Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, in collaboration with SU, the University of Fort Hare, and a network of non-profit partners including the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the Stavanger Art Museum, the Quagga Project and the Robertson Museum in South Africa. 

SA exhibition

One of HEART’s flagship outputs will be a co-curated exhibition in South Africa that combines historical research, digital modelling and artistic interpretation to reanimate stories of extinct animals for contemporary audiences. 

HEART investigates how to tell stories across deep time, how to facilitate digital repatriation of natural history specimens, and how museums can engage audiences with extinction histories. The exhibition will also highlight contemporary de-extinction initiatives conducted by the Quagga Project and extinction-themed artworks curated by the Stavanger Art Museum. 

“Extinction is one of our major environmental challenges,” says Prof Dolly Jørgensen, HEART leader in Norway and co-director of the Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humanities. “Extinction might be thought of as something very distant from the average person’s experience, yet everyone can engage with extinct animals through their remains or traces that exist within museum collections.” 

By combining historical research, museum practice and creative engagement, HEART seeks to rethink how extinction is understood, narrated and remembered.