Wherever possible throughout the text I have acknowledged those whose wisdom, knowledge or example has helped me to write this book. But there are one or two who need special mention, not all of whom will be aware of how much I relied on them. Chief among these is the team at the University of Queensland, led by Diana O. Fisher, whose paper on the survival of supposedly extinct species first piqued my interest. The idea was fanned into flame by Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of the IUCN species programme at Cambridge, and Paula Jenkins, curator of mammals, who showed me type-specimens of Lazarus species at the Natural History Museum. I need also to remember some old colleagues – Philip Clarke and Brian Jackman in particular – whose enthusiasm for the physical world rubbed off on me over the years, and editors (Robin Morgan, Sarah Baxter) who enabled me to broaden my experience.
The visit to Ol Pejeta could not have been accomplished without Mark Rose, Ally Catterick and Richard Lamprey at Fauna & Flora International, Richard Vigne and the staff at Ol Pejeta, Andy and Sonja Webb at Kicheche Camp, and my guide Andrew Odhiambo. I am indebted also to Rainbow Tours, who expertly dealt with the logistics and generously picked up the bill.
Without help from the staff at the University of Florence and La Specola, I would never have tracked down the two real heroes of my story, the extraordinary Professor Simonetta and the vanishingly rare creature that gives the book its title. The entire book stands as acknowledgement to the professor himself.
My understanding of the zoological small-print was greatly helped by the London Zoological Society’s EDGE project, and I thank its programme director, Jonathan Baillie, for helping me crystallise my thoughts.
The idea for this book – to locate a minuscule bone fragment found inside an owl pellet – cannot have been the most enticing proposal a publisher has ever received. For this reason I am more than usually grateful to my agent Karolina Sutton for selling the idea, and to Poppy Hampson at Chatto for actually buying it. Text editors – the painstaking individuals who go through a text line by line, combing out the fleas – are the unsung heroes of the publishing trade, and in Alison Tulett I had a classically hawk-eyed specimen of the breed. My thanks to her, and to my patient friend Oliver Riviere for his technical help with the pictures.
My wife Caroline was there at the beginning – without her, the idea would have been stillborn – there as a guiding hand through the writing, and there at the end when, in Florence, the golden mole finally became a golden moment. What I owe her is far beyond the scope of the printed page.