The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  He speaks, too, of what he calls the original golden mole, the first one to be discovered and described, popularly known in English as the Cape golden mole. ‘It has a strange story in the name,’ he says. ‘Because it is called Chrysochloris asiatica and there are no Asiatic golden moles at all.’ It turns out to have been a mistake made by Linnaeus himself, who first noted the species in 1758, the consequence of a simple handling error. The specimen arrived among a job-lot of species that had been collected by one of his pupils in China. Unfortunately for taxonomic and phylogenetic accuracy, the ship on its way home made a call at Cape Town . . .

  We arrange to meet again at 10 a.m. on the following day at La Specola, the museum of zoology and natural history, in Via Romana, where he promises to have something of interest to show me. Of course, I know now what it must be, and I am resolved for this one day to become a diarist, to record every detail of this climactic morning. Waking at seven thirty, I draw back the curtains and step out on to the balcony of our hotel room overlooking the Arno. The view is astonishing. Almost directly opposite, across the river, is the fourteenth-century Porta San Niccolo, and high above it, already bustling, Piazzale Michelangelo. A crest of cypresses along the ridge-top creates the impression of a sleeping dog with its hackles raised. Only a tiny trickle of water is coming over the Pescaia di San Niccolo weir, the slow tranquillity of the water in contrast to the traffic teeming along the Lungarno Serristori and Lungarno della Zecca Vecchia. Bells speak from the heart of the old city; sirens of ambulances from the clogged arteries of the new. I even record my breakfast: scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee. And what I am wearing: stone-coloured chinos, trekking sandals, a blue and white seersucker shirt. In a canvas shoulder bag I have notebook and pen, voice recorder and compact digital camera. I cannot remember when a day seemed more portentous.

  Already feeling the heat, we make our way along the Lungarno delle Grazie towards the Uffizi and the Ponte Vecchio. Along the narrow pavements we are squeezed between ancient walls and the massed ranks of parked motor-scooters. Their windshields are like translucent wings, a grounded swarm of flying ants. Near the Uffizi I collide with a bollard and bruise my leg. The street vendors are out: garish paintings, leather goods, jewellery, toys. The Ponte Vecchio now is a decorous place with its chi-chi art dealers and jewellery shops, a far cry from its reeking medieval origins when it housed the city’s butchers. Across the bridge we head along the Via de Guicciardini towards the Palazzo Pitti, stopping to scan restaurant menus for the celebratory lunch we’ll have when the morning’s business is over. The Palazzo Pitti bankrupted the banker who began it in 1457. Not so the Medici family, in whose hands it would become a monument to wealth, influence and ostentation. This was the seat of their almighty power, and they meant no one to forget it. Already this morning visitors are beginning the long trek through its galleries, voices hushed as in a place of worship. Our destination now is almost within sight. Beyond the Palazzo the opulence drains away into the nondescript Piazza de San Felice, where a police roadblock is causing chaos. Robert and Elizabeth Browning occupied rooms here from 1847 to 1861 (they are now owned by Eton College and available to rent through the Landmark Trust), though the noise and fumes of the traffic are today a pretty strong antidote to poetic musings. A twenty-minute stroll has transported us through five and a half centuries of human endeavour in which each of our signal virtues – imagination, creativity, generosity – has met its antithesis. We are early, so kill time with industrial-strength espressos at a pavement cafe, where we sit wreathed in carbon monoxide.

  La Specola is only a few yards further on, but even so it is not easy to spot. There is a modest signboard and an entrance that could take lessons in grandeur from a stationery depot. I console myself with the thought that great searches often end in unexpected places – indeed, it’s the obscure corners that most excite the diligent searcher. But then, La Specola is hardly an obscure corner. Even now, despite the ticket office and the sign outside, I wonder if we are in the right place. Further up the street, perhaps . . . I check my watch. The professor must have been checking his, too. We have been watching the Via Romana but he appears behind us from somewhere inside the building, the rapping of his stick ticking down the last few seconds to the appointed hour of ten. He has travelled by bus – not a feat to compare with crossing Somalia in a Land Rover, but nevertheless a considerable effort for an elderly man who walks with a stick. I want to tell him how grateful I am, but he is already bustling away towards the staircase. As we ascend, I notice that he is still wearing his sandals, but now with a blue plaster on one of his toes. It’s an odd thing to notice, and an even odder one to write down, but Florence does strange things to the mind. There is so much grandiloquence, so many monuments to wealth. Even in the glorification of the Christian god, there are so many declarations of temporal power that it takes a plaster on a toe to remind us of how frail we really are. The museum of La Specola is, in the true sense of the word, awesome. You don’t have to care how nature works. You might, like Richard Owen, see the hand of a creator. You might, like his opponent Thomas Huxley, or like modern Darwinians and Dawkinsites, see the mysterious loveliness of rational science. It doesn’t matter. Faced with the architectural and artistic glories of Florence, it would take a monstrous ego not to feel small. Faced with the miracles within La Specola, even a monstrously egotistical Medici would know humility.

  The man who found the mole – Professor Alberto Simonetta (left) with the author at La Specola

  We are met by the curator of mammals, Paolo Agnelli, who will lead us on a tour of the galleries. One of the first rooms through which we pass is the very grand Tribune of Galileo, which was built in 1841 originally to display scientific instruments of Galileo and others, all now removed to the Museum of the History of Science, the Museo Galileo, in the Piazza dei Giudici near the Uffizi (if you want proof of human genius, then here is a very good place to start). La Specola itself was founded in 1775, the first scientific museum open to the public in Europe, beating London’s Natural History Museum by 106 years. With life for once imitating art, its early collections of fossils, animals, minerals and plants depended heavily on the magpie tendencies of the Medici. It still feels like a palace treasury.

  Several times in my life I have tried to take an interest in geology, and every time I have failed. Not this time. My recorded comments as I’m led around are borderline embarrassing:

  Extraordinary! Extraordinary . . . It’s amazing. I don’t know what all these things are. Basalt, I think. Pink rock from Elba. It looks like you ought to be able to eat it. They look like they’re made of sugar, some of them. They are pink, bronze, black, purple, blood red, opalescent green. Something looks like a lump of frozen seawater. Something else looks like it’s been carved out of coconut. Another one looks like flakes of chocolate. And others look like coloured ice, like extravagant puddings . . .

  On and on I go, my inarticulacy more articulate in its way than any well-worded scientific analysis. For a moment I’ve forgotten the mole; forgotten what has brought me here. The weary adult is blown away by his inner child. Who would believe such stuff? But already we’re moving on, from solid rock into the primitive stirrings of arthropodic life. It is like another compartment of the same multicoloured jewel-case. There are beetles, leaf insects, stick insects, bees . . . On the recording machine I hear what I missed at the time – Caroline and the professor chatting about the fur of golden moles. It is only the Cape species, the misnamed Chrysochloris asiatica, he says, that has the famous iridescence described by the British Cyclopaedia of Natural History in 1836. I hear myself struggling to catch up, still gabbling into my microphone.

  We’re now into spider crabs and whatnot. Hermit crabs. An enormous brown crab the size of a small dog. Spotted crabs, lobsters, Norway lobster, crayfish . . . Tape worms. My god! A roomful of intestinal parasites . . .

  I realise I am being rude, neglecting the professor, dawdling like an uncooperative child, unable to tear m
yself from the exhibits. Some mammals are coming up now, and the timelines suddenly converge. The professor is pointing out some specimens from the very same expeditions that we saw on the films. ‘These are dik-diks,’ he is saying. ‘Guenther’s dik-diks.’ There are also two larger antelopes, gerenuk (Litocranius walleri) and dibatag (Ammodorcus clarkei, or Clarke’s gazelle). Caroline wants to know if he shot and skinned them himself. ‘The big ones yes, certainly.’ How very different is this from the Natural History Museum in London, which could not identify specimens shot by Frederick Selous. Here it is like touring the exhibition with Selous himself. There is another difference, too. In London the stuffed specimens are kept as bygones, like a museum within a museum, incidental to its higher purpose. In Florence they are the heart and soul of the place. The professor points to a Grant’s gazelle. That, too, came from his time in Somalia. So did a pair of mongooses; and – look! – here are the same little genets we saw on the film. And something I’d never heard of – ‘a rare sort of thing’, as the professor puts it – a Speke’s pectinator (Pectinator spekei), named after the English explorer John Hanning Speke, famous for his early explorations of Somalia and his quest for the source of the Nile. The professor surges onward past rabbits, hares, porcupines, flying squirrels, dozens of squirrel-like things that I can’t put a name to. Then the ungulates – vicuna, muntjac, Chinese water deer, llama, reindeer, red deer . . . Primates – baboon, mandrills, monkeys, macaques, gibbons, chimpanzee, orang-utan, gorilla . . . A thylacine!

  ‘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.