Fifteen minutes from the centre of Florence, at the bottom of a leafy suburban street, the taxi drops us off, Caroline and me, in front of a green wooden gate. On the gate are an entry-phone and two bell-pushes. I do as I have been instructed, and press them both. Already, at ten in the morning, the sun is burning the top of my head and adding to the nervous sweat. I have not slept well, my mind churning with what-ifs. Florence in September is glorious, but it’s a long way for a wild-goose chase. What if he’s not at home? What if the mole really has been lost, as I have been warned? What if . . .? But the entry-phone buzzes, the gate clicks open and we find ourselves in a steep overgrown garden, vigorously unruly, of the kind that seems not so much cultivated as tamed – an amiable contest between man and nature that has resulted in an honourable draw. To our right as we climb the curving stone steps I notice some old cartwheels and a bicycle; ahead of us, glimpsed through the foliage, the outline of a house. At the top of the steps, on a sunny terrace with a greyhound at his feet, stands a small elderly man wearing a khaki bush-shirt, crumpled clay-coloured trousers and a pair of sandals that look as if it they might have walked here from Africa. He holds out his hand and leads us into the curtained interior. As our eyes adjust to the gloom, it becomes apparent that the house is as much a museum as a home. Professor Simonetta had it built in 1966, but I would have been two centuries out if I’d tried to guess its age. Generations of gilt-framed ancestors peer down from the walls on what looks like a film set of historic clutter. English silver, an inkstand with quills, cases of antiquarian books. The steep gradient means that the front door is on the upper floor. When we go downstairs later to look for wine (he knows there is some but can’t remember what) he shows me cabinets full of children’s books and toys – cars, tanks, aeroplanes, several wars’ worth of soldiers, dolls and puppets stretching back to the eighteenth century. He is not, he insists, a collector. Merely an accumulator. This is all stuff handed down through his and his late wife’s families.
The professor is eighty-two, but retired only in the sense that he no longer teaches. He has four papers awaiting publication and a book on evolution on the way. It amuses him that I have come so far to see so little, but then amusement seems to be his speciality. The taped conversations, spread over two days, are full of sentences dissolving into laughter. He walks with a stick but has a filing-cabinet memory and a mind like a steel trap – nothing escapes him, and careless questions are biffed straight back. ‘WHAT?’ Within moments it becomes clear that my preconceived idea of him has been a hopeless miscalculation. In my imagination he was an obscure researcher whose career peaked serendipitously in 1964 with the accidental discovery of an owl pellet. In reality, Calcochloris tytonis was little more than a briefly amusing footnote in a long and distinguished career that raised him from a seven-year-old bug-hunter to the highly esteemed Professor of Zoology at the University of Florence. So many species have been named after him that even his formidable memory is unequal to the task. ‘Well, I can’t remember all of them,’ he says, ‘but one or two species of grasshoppers. At least one lizard. I have, I think, a snake.’ Back in England, poring over the textbooks, I manage to track down eight. They include a marine worm, three dung beetles, a grasshopper and a praying mantis. I cannot identify the snake, but am amply compensated by the Coastal rock gecko (Pristurus simonettai) and, best of all, Simonetta’s writhing skink (Lygosoma simonettai).
His curriculum vitae runs to twenty-five pages and lists 280 publications. Some of these, like ‘On the distribution and significance of the Paratympanic organ’, are academic papers on zoological minutiae far beyond the audible range of laymen (the ‘Paratympanic organ’, to save you looking it up, is ‘a small sensory organ in the middle ear of birds’). There is plenty of stuff, too, on the classification of fossils, the mammals of Somalia, the skull of the dik-dik, ‘the myth of objective taxonomy and cladism’, loads of grist for the zoological mill. But there are other things, too, that I would never have suspected (or at least would not have expected until I stepped inside his house). ‘Some hypotheses on the military and political structures of the Indo-Greek Kingdom’. Essays on the coins of the ancient world. Works in preparation include not only ‘The skull morphology of phreatic fish’, but also ‘A guide to the Parthian Coinage (with a description of the author’s collection)’. The width and depth of his focus seem infinite; his interest inexhaustible. And, of course, catalogued as Number 63, there is the paper that has brought me here: ‘A new Golden mole from Somalia with an appendix on the taxonomy of the family Chrysochloridae’.
Zoology is a peculiar discipline calling for an improbable combination of cerebral, psychological and physical skills. It’s not enough to be an adventurer. It’s not enough to have an enquiring mind. It’s not enough to have mental stamina and an easy command of minutely nuanced detail. You must have them all. And you must have them all in abundance. The professor’s great uncle – his grandmother’s brother – was murdered by shifta during an exploration of the Omo valley in southern Ethiopia, unruly neighbour of the even unrulier Somalia. His own expeditions to Somalia, Afghanistan and Congo-Zaire cannot have been without danger; and yet the gung-ho zoological commando needs a steady, counter-balancing alter ego who is as adept at the microscope as he is in digging out a stranded Land Rover. It’s hard to imagine all this in the professor now, yet his stories have more than a distant echo of Gordon-Cumming or Selous. And we don’t have to imagine them. The expeditions are recorded on film. Would we like to see them? he wonders.
It means moving to the dining room. There is a long cluttered table, a dresser crammed with glass and china, and a cushioned bench on which we have to wedge half a buttock and twist our heads as he loads the cassettes. No film was made of his very first expedition to Somalia in 1959, the last year of the Italian administration, when he was a twenty-nine-year-old junior lecturer at the University of Florence. ‘We thought it was perhaps the last opportunity to collect animals in Somalia before the administration gave way,’ he says. ‘It was just a small expedition that lasted two months, but we were very lucky and collected a lot of good things.’ It was enough to persuade Italy’s National Research Council, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, to fund a second expedition in 1962. This is the subject of the first video we see, which the professor shot originally on Super8 cine film, with his own commentary in Italian. The swashbuckler and the master of detail merge into a single obsessive record-keeper. Nothing is omitted. We see the gear being stowed aboard ship at Genoa. We watch the banks of the Suez Canal slide slowly past, and then the roll and yaw of the Land Rover as it confronts the Somali interior. And then at last we get down to zoology. There is the young professor himself, dark-haired and handsome, cleaning the skull of a mouse; a colleague stripping a snake; the professor again, skinning a Grant’s gazelle. The flayed carcass will be left outside the tent for scavengers to strip before the bones are brought back to Florence. There are some winsome baby genets, and guinea fowl hunted for the pot, which have to be caught alive. The Somali support crew are Muslims and will only eat birds or animals that have been slaughtered by having their throats cut. While we watch shots of a craftsman carving white soapstone, the professor suddenly produces a jug made from the same material, as if the film were transcending time and space and reaching out into the room. Yet the most intriguing shot is so brief that we almost miss it – a swift pan across the facade of a house in Giohar. It is gone so quickly that I have no time to notice, let alone record, any detail beyond a sense of isolation and a shading of trees. This was the house they used as their operational base, the one to which they will return two years later in the crucial year of 1964. It has an outbuilding within which stands a disused oven, and in the oven roosts a family of hungry barn owls. This is the very shrine; the last and only known resting place of Calcochloris tytonis.
Disappointingly the film of 1964 makes no reference to the golden mole. We are shown turtles, naked mole rats, vipers, Marabou storks, baboons, egrets. We see dik-diks being caught like rabbits in a long-net, and a dead lioness of a Somali sub-species, collected (i.e. shot) for the Natural History Museum in Florence. It is scenes like this, the obvious inhospitality of the terrain, the careful conservation of water from the roof of the tent, that seem somehow to close the circle, to call upon the spirit of Selous and Gordon-Cumming, brother-adventurers joining hands across the centuries. Fifty years ago, however, the emphasis was already shifting from explorations of the infinite to inventories of the vulnerable. The professor agrees with Jonathan Baillie. Before you can decide what to conserve, he says, you have to find out what is there. The films themselves have lain on shelves, filed away not just as memorabilia but as part of a scientific record. He last watched them, he says, in 1982.
For seekers of small mammals, few things are more propitious than an owl pellet. ‘It is a sort of mine for nocturnal and small animals,’ the professor says. ‘It is always good to collect these, because you have a very complete sample of the fauna.’ He laughs at the memory. ‘When you find pellets from owls, you always collect them.’ Although, sadly for me, he neglected to film himself doing it, he shovelled out the entire contents of the oven and brought them back to Florence. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of it,’ he says, ‘was – what is it called in English? A sort of mole-rat without hair?’ Naked mole-rat, I wonder? ‘Ah yes. And then there was that one!’
That one! The rarest mammal on earth! But the Somali golden mole, it turns out, is not the only new species he has discovered. He reckons there are at least twenty. Always, the discoveries are serendipitous. For a while, around 1980, he taught zoology at the agricultural university in Somalia. While there he found two specimens of what his colleague Benedetto Lanza would later identify as a new species of lizard. One was discovered among the university’s poorly kept collection of skins; the other, more recently alive, was delivered to him in two pieces. A student had gone to pick up a book she had left in the sun, and found a lizard basking on the open pages. ‘She was afraid,’ says the professor. ‘She closed the book like that [he claps his hands] and cut the lizard in half.’
The real skill, of course, lies not so much in finding things but in realising that they are new. ‘The important thing is the study of the collections, not the collecting itself,’ he says. ‘Anyone can do the collecting.’ Well, as we shall see, that is true up to a point. In trying to find living examples of the Somali golden mole, the professor enlisted local children, who were promised a Somali shilling for every specimen they found. This is usually a reliable method, though in this case they drew a blank. It was no particular surprise. Golden moles live underground, leave little trace on the surface, and make their nests in burrows under bushes which are very difficult to find. ‘Unless they are locally common,’ says the professor, ‘to meet one on the surface is exceptional.’ It dawns on me that some of these Giohar Irregulars would have been scarcely younger than Alberto Simonetta was himself when he was admitted to university at the precociously early age of sixteen. He was still precocious fourteen years later when, at thirty, he won a scholarship from the National Academy of Sciences and was let loose on one of the world’s most important fossil collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. These were finds from the famous Burgess Shale fossil fields, discovered in 1909 by the American palaeontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott high in the Canadian Rockies. Whole books have been written about the Burgess Shale, whose tens of thousands of 500-million-year-old fossils contain a wider diversity of life than may be found in the oceans of the twenty-first century, many of them unlike any living animals. Not even their discoverer, Walcott, who died in 1927, ever fully understood what they showed. In classifying and describing them in the early 1960s, the professor now admits that he made mistakes. These are seized upon by the pugnacious American biologist, the late Stephen Jay Gould, in his book on the Burgess Shale, Wonderful Life, published in 1989. But Gould adds a generous footnote: ‘He alone, after Walcott and before Whittington, attempted a comprehensive program of revision for Burgess arthropods . . . he also provided substantial improvements upon several earlier studies, and through his comprehensive efforts reminded paleontologists about the richness of the Burgess Shale.’ The professor, I realise, is like the tip of an iceberg, the visible manifestation of an unsuspected life. I had known something of the Burgess Shale before I flew out to meet him – indeed, I had read Stephen Jay Gould’s book – but my surfing of the Internet had told me nothing of his contribution to its study. What other surprises might he have in store?
The first is lunch. Waving away Caroline’s offer of help, he potters off to the kitchen and returns with ear-shaped pasta, orecchiette, floating in a delicate chicken broth. This is followed by a dish of cold beef and chicken served with salsa verde and salad; then sbrisolona, a sweet crunchy tart flavoured with lemon and almonds. He seems surprised when we pat our stomachs and decline fruit and cheese. This courtly old gentleman passing the dishes seems so different, evolutionarily distinct almost, from the young Simonetta of the films, the adventurer who provisioned his colleagues with gun and knife. But he makes a perfect fit with the distinguished trustee of Italian national parks, the eminent author of papers and books, and the holder of one of his country’s most prestigious chairs in zoology. The physical energy of the young man who believed everything should be collected – ‘Because perhaps no one will ever be there again. Or perhaps people will go there after lots of years and things may have completely changed’ – has ceded to an intellectual energy of daunting speed and voracity. He may not be able to remember how many species have been named for him; otherwise everything else races out on a synaptic super-highway that seems to have infinite capacity for names, dates and numbers.
He tells of fresh whale skulls washed up on beaches but belonging to a species nobody has ever seen alive. Of the extinct dwarf emu, of which the number in museums exceeds the number of specimens collected in the wild. Of the muddling by Linnaeus of two different kinds of gibbon. Of a bird, the greater honeyguide (Indicator indicator), which eats beeswax. It is a story that particularly delights him. Scientists discovered not only that the bacteria in the birds’ gut produce an enzyme that digests the wax – a fact that might otherwise be filed under Just Fancy That – but that the enzyme will also attack the wax covering of tuberculosis bacteria, which exponentially increases their vulnerability to antibiotics. Eureka! you might think. The trouble, says the professor, is that these potentially useful bacteria live only in the gut of the honeyguide, a parasitic species which, cuckoo-like, lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, a fact that seriously complicates the problem of reproducing the enzyme for medical use. Nevertheless, it’s a discovery that points yet again to the existence in nature of substances of immense potential usefulness to humans. The professor tells the story in answer to a question – the same old question that everyone always asks – about the point of species conservation. It is precisely because we don’t understand their value, he says, that we need to preserve them. At the moment, as species slip away, we have no idea what we might be losing. ‘We don’t know what we’re doing,’ he says simply. The fact is, we never have.
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 myself 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.
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.
‘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.’
Paolo Agnelli, who seems to understand the workings of my camera better than I do, takes a photograph of the Petri dish, then one of me with the professor. I take one of the two scientists standing together in the curator’s office. I have one last question. The Giohar Irregulars failed to find any living examples of the mole in 1964, and no one has recorded any since. Does the professor believe they could still be there, undisturbed by the human turmoil in the world above, silently going about their business? He answers without doubt or hesitation. ‘Yes. Why wouldn’t they be?’ If they were there before the owl pellet, then why shouldn’t they be there afterwards? The Petri dish might contain all the known evidence for the mole’s existence, but that shouldn’t be confused with the species itself. I think again what I have been made to think so often during this brief ascent from ignorance. There is more to the world than the eye can see, or than the imagination can embrace. All we can do is go on looking and listing. The book has been a quest; so has our journey through the museum. From the very bedrock of the planet we have travelled through every kind of articulate life: insects, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, and onwards deep into our own corporeal entities. Every scrap of it in its own way is a miracle that confounds the laws of chance. Every scrap of it should be clung to with a tenacity that confounds the self-absorption of our greedy and destructive selves. Humans have the power of gods; now they need the wisdom to go with it.
It is late morning, and the professor is glancing at his watch. We invite him to join us for lunch, to share a toast to the man and his mammal, but he declines. His housekeeper will be waiting, he says. Slowly, for he is tired now, we walk with him to the bus stop, while he talks about the novels he plans to write. Looking back after we have said goodbye, I see him raise his stick to the approaching bus, and I wish there could be some new species to be named after him: something of high intelligence, grace and stamina, able to thrive in a range of habitats.
Anything but a mole.