The Hunt for the Golden Mole (36 page)

‘Yes,' says the professor. ‘We have two of them.'

I hear myself remark: ‘A lot of people in Tasmania think they're still alive.'

‘Well,' he says, ‘I hope so.' The whole of creation, or so it seems, is flashing past at the speed of a hurrying eighty-two-year-old with
a stick. My voice on the recorder struggles to keep up.
Cuscus, lots of lemurs, aye-aye, more lemurs, tamarin monkey, pangolin . . . Ah!
A brief pause, three taps of the stick, then the professor's voice breaks in to explain the sudden silence. ‘These are golden moles.'
Ah!
There are two. One of them nominally is the same as the one on my mobile phone that I photographed in London – the giant golden mole,
Chrysospalax trevelyani
– but this one has been much more carefully stuffed and mounted, so that it looks like a real animal instead of a novelty slipper. The other one, tiny by comparison, is the hottentot golden mole,
Amblysomus hottentotus
, about the size of an English breakfast sausage.

Then we are off again, into the birds of Italy, taped birdsong playing in the background.
Grebes, flamingo, spoonbill, raven, crows, jay, cuckoo, hoopoe, various falcons, peregrine . . . Now we have crocodiles. Alligators. More birds. Pigeons, peacock, nests, eggs . . . Extinct birds. The dwarf emu, the great auk, the passenger pigeon.
This last is one of the dark miracles of extinction. Birds generally lie outside the scope of this book, but the story of the passenger pigeon is too gross to overlook. This is, or was, not just any old species. In the nineteenth century it was the most numerous bird on the planet. A native of northern America, it travelled at high speed – up to 100 kilometres per hour – in flocks of near cosmic size. In 1813 John James Audubon calculated that one such flock contained more than a billion birds, blotting out the sun in an avian eclipse 55 miles long. Sam Turvey in
Witness to Extinction
mentions flocks that stretched for 300 miles and were probably 3.5 billion strong. Their droppings, says Tim Flannery in
A Gap in Nature
, ‘fell like snow'. Not any more. Passenger pigeons were hunted with such incontinent voracity that by the 1870s the great flocks were a thing of the past, and a species that had once accounted for 40 per cent of all the birds
in North America was spiralling like flying herring into freefall. The very last wild individual was shot by a fourteen-year-old boy at Sargenta, Ohio, in March 1900. The clock had just one more tick to make. A captive bird survived at Cincinatti Zoo until 1 p.m. on 1 September 1914, when it keeled over and took the entire species with it. No wonder the professor stops in front of the specimen and gives us time to ponder.

Then he is off again, past the penguins, the ostriches and owls, pausing briefly by
Titus alba
, the barn owl, whose taste for moles began the whole story. I am noting things almost at random.
Two giant Galapagos tortoises. A Nile crocodile. A leatherback turtle. Snakes. A boa constrictor. A python. But what is this?
I am looking at a peculiarly primitive-looking lizard, like a scaled-down killer from
Jurassic Park
. ‘It's a tuatara,' says the professor. ‘A sphenodon. It is a unique species from New Zealand, which is practically identical with Jurassic animals.'
So it's a sort of living fossil?
‘Yes, it is.' On again, into fish.
Dorado, sharks, Dover sole, herring, pilchard, tiger shark . . .

Even though I know it must be imminent, I'm not prepared for what comes next. It is, so far as I know, unique – the thing La Specola is best known for, recommended in all the guide-books (though with the caveat that a strong stomach might be needed). The immediate impression is of a vast butcher's shop, slithering with offal and piled with darkening joints of meat. Truly it is a thing of awesome artistic and technical brilliance; almost impossible to believe it is more than 200 years old, so recently alive does it look. There is not, there cannot be, anything like it in the world. The offal, the bones, the brains, the meat, all of it is human, but modelled in wax. But these are not mere likenesses. They are
facsimiles.
The weight, colour and texture of human tissue are exactly as they were in the
dissections they so carefully replicate. The stumps of sawn-off thighs on a pregnant torso look disturbingly ready for the carving knife. The spilling intestines compel you instinctively to cover your nose. The collection fills ten rooms, and there is no part of the human body that is not stripped out for inspection. There are deconstructed heads, faces, limbs, torsos, wombs. The primary purpose was educational, to give medical students the benefits of human dissections without needing actual cadavers – a more sophisticated approach than the English habit of grave-robbing. But art, too, exerts its influence, most obviously in the ‘anatomical Venuses', lifelike, erotically posed figures of naked young women spatchcocked with their innards hanging out. These reputedly were much to the taste of the Marquis de Sade.

Beyond this waxen charnel house we come to similar models of dissected animals – sheep, chicken, dog, cat, tortoise – but the professor is picking up speed again, making for the stairs. On the ground floor is a hall of animal skulls and skeletons, not open to the public today but opened specially for our enjoyment. The professor is heading for the whale he told us about yesterday, the one whose skull had washed up on beaches but no one had seen alive.

It is like a gallery of classical sculpture, a display of power and beauty that draws the eye over every plane and curve; nature as art. Overnight, the professor has lent us a copy of his book,
Short History of Biology: from the Origins to the 20th Century
, and in it Caroline has found a quotation from Aristotle:

‘. . . So we must, without disgust, begin the study of animals, as in every one of them there appears the beauty of nature, built as they are by nature itself so that nothing is random, but everything is for a purpose, and the purpose
for which they are made takes the place that beauty has in a work of art.'

Perhaps I am not the only one whose mind fills suddenly with wordless abstractions. The curator, Paolo Agnelli, puts on a cassette of Mozart, evidence of a sensibility that transcends the ordering of bones. I remember the professor, earlier in the day, reaching into his bag. ‘I have taken the liberty,' he had said, and showed Caroline a photograph album of his late wife, Stefania. She was a woman of striking beauty who travelled with him on many of his expeditions. A woman, he tells us needlessly – we can see it in her face – of powerful intellect and forceful personality. The album is simultaneously a purely physical thing, a chemical record of light and shade, and a deeply personal work of art. I am reminded, as I often am, of the separate compartments into which art and science were corralled by the designers of my grammar school education in the early 1960s, as if emotion had no place in the one, and reason no place in the other. It still makes me angry.

Once again in the gallery of bones I have time only for a fleeting record of what I see.
Skulls and whole skeletons of, I don't know what. I think that's a horse. There's an ostrich. A Sumatran rhino. An elephant skull. All kinds of horned animals. Sets of horns. An Indian elephant. A dromedary. A giraffe. Wild boar
. ‘This is the whale,' the professor says. ‘This was the second specimen discovered. Now there are eight.' In fact, Paolo Agnelli now tells us, there have been several sightings of the living animal itself, the Indo-Pacific beaked whale,
Indopacetus pacificus.
But for some years after it was discovered in 1955 this was the only known evidence of the species since the first skull was collected in Queensland, Australia, in 1882. It is a typical story of sadness and serendipity. The 5-metre-long whale was stranded near
Danane, Somalia, in 1955, whence it was hauled off by local fishermen to be turned into oil and fertiliser. All that remained of it after processing was the skull and mandible we are now looking at.

But, of course, this is not the most important mandible of the day. The moment has come. Leaning on his stick, the professor leads us up the ancient stone staircase, past the public rooms and into Paolo Agnelli's office, where we are ushered to a table in an ante-room. There are glass cases filled with animal skulls, and another boxful on the table. Rhino and goat heads, one dated 1897, are mounted high up on the wall; and there is another ante-room beyond the first, darkened and smelling of insecticide. Groping my way through the gloom, I find the room is packed with stuffed marine mammals in glass cases. Back in the light I return to the table, on which stands a microscope and an empty Petri dish. No trumpet sounds. No drums roll. There is no swelling of strings or cathedral choirs. The only soundtrack to the climactic event, the end of the quest, is my own voice droning on the recording machine.

Paolo puts down a tiny glass phial, about the size of a baby aspirin container. It is packed with cotton wool. Under the cotton wool is an even tinier container, thinner than a thimble. Paolo opens it. And there it is! Calcochloris tytonis!

Two other voices now intrude. The professor's: ‘This is all!' And Caroline's, a confidential whisper: ‘You're a bit sweaty!' Excitement is dripping off the end of my nose. It is a moment I have been anticipating for months, and yet I find myself strangely unprepared. Of course it was going to be small! I knew that. It was in an owl pellet. But it is so extremely, utterly
minuscule, so completely without consequence, that I can't believe even a keen young zoologist would have given it a second glance. ‘It's a question of practice,' says the professor when I ask him how he knew it was something special. When he found it, the fragment – mandible and part of the ear assembly – was still intact. Over time, and in handling, it has disassembled into three separate tiny pieces. With the naked eye – with
my
naked eye – they make no sense. Paolo puts them in the Petri dish and places them under the microscope, which he has set to a magnification of six. I ask him if anyone else has ever asked to see them.

Golden discovery. The jawbone, teeth and middle ear bones of the Somali golden mole. The animal was eaten by an owl in 1964

‘No one for the last twenty years,' he says. And who was the last? Was it the professor himself? ‘Probably.' We all laugh, the tiny mole's entire circle of friends. Through the microscope,
it looks enormous –
like the jawbone of a whale
, my commentary says, though it's nothing like a whale at all. But it's a predator's jaw, and these are predator's teeth, once eager for insect and worm. All the same, when I try to flesh out the animal in my head the picture has no definition. For months I have carried the mole as an
idea
, but this physical reality, these earthly remains, are too cryptic for my unschooled mind. The professor hands me a pair of thin pointed tweezers so that I can turn the pieces and see them from every angle. This is an extraordinary privilege, a compliment to a competency I do not have. At the Natural History Museum in London, quite reasonably I was allowed to touch nothing. Yet now, at the oldest scientific museum in Europe, this unique and fragile relic is at the mercy of my probing. The largest fragment, the mandible, is a fraction over a centimetre long. The smallest, the malleus, is about the size of a grain of rice. Incredibly, when the professor sifted all the detritus from the Giohar oven, it was this negligible speck that told him it was something unique.

Informed by his earlier experience in South Africa, he had realised at once that it was a golden mole. ‘It is very easy to recognise a golden mole fragment,' he says. ‘From the teeth, from the shape of the mandible, from the ear. The shape of the ear is very diagnostic.' But there was an anomaly, a peculiarity of latitude. No one had ever seen a golden mole north of the equator before. The professor took photographs, recorded measurements, made drawings and compared his fragments with the equivalent parts of other moles. The suspicion hardened into a certainty. It was typically a golden mole, but different from all others. The professor initially placed his new species,
tytonis
, in the genus
Amblysomus,
in kinship with the fynbos, hottentot, Marley's, robust and highveld golden moles, but – as evolution
itself evolved – it was later reassigned to the
Chrysochloridae
, with the Congo and yellow species. It may stay for ever in the bosom of its new family, or it may move on again. With no evidence beyond the Petri dish, the IUCN
Red List
has no option but to classify the Somali golden mole as data deficient and
incertae sedis
– of uncertain placement in the taxonomic tree.

Does it matter? Not really. Nomenclature is an academic diversion, a kind of hobby science that keeps zoologists amused and imposes a pretended order on the chaos of evolution. It gives us a way of knowing what we have, and what we stand to lose, but it has no currency in forest or field, where animals evolve with no reference to their man-given identities.
Calcochloris tytonis
may be ‘related' to
Calcochloris leucorhinus
and to
Calcochloris obtusirostris
, but the relationship is immaterial, an academic construct that shines no light beneath the soils of Africa. In nature, horizontal relationships between similar but disconnected species are of small importance compared to the vertical relationships of disparate species that share the same territory – the interdependent creatures, from invertebrates to carnivores, that keep an ecosystem in balance. That truly is why
Calcochloris tytonis
matters. I had been thinking of it symbolically, as if its value were totemic, its tiny phial like the Tomb of the Unknown Mammal, dedicated to the memory of all lost and dying species. And of course it
is
that. But it's more. The mole is a tiny part of an incomprehensibly complex, infinitely mysterious mechanism that will not work as well without it. I am reminded of something the professor said yesterday: ‘Species exist only in our mind. Any sort of living being depends on other living beings, so the evolving unit is never one species. It is always complex.'