The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  CHAPTER SIX

  Resurrection

  A man at a party, name of Chris, has heard I am writing a book and wants to know what it’s about. I tell him it’s about an owl pellet. He laughs at what he takes to be a joke, and wishes me luck with my ‘novel’. Sometimes it does feel like that. Men like Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, Abraham Dee Bartlett, Frank Buckland, Carl Hagenbeck and Frank Buck could so easily have stepped from the pages of fiction. I am surprised, too, by the elusiveness of facts, and fall into the layman’s errors of expecting simple answers to simple questions, of failing to understand the thinness of the membrane between fact and fantasy. The evidence for the Somali golden mole would hardly fill a teaspoon. Even if I do find it, I will have to rely on others to ‘read’ it for me. But then of course it was the very uncertainty of its existence that caught my imagination in the first place. If I wanted to be certain of success I would have searched for a baboon.

  In Chapter One I mentioned some research from the University of Queensland, published in 2010, which argued that a third of all mammals previously thought extinct were actually still alive. The story flickered briefly across the news pages and then fluttered into the archive, leaving nothing behind but unanswered questions. If so many species are returning from the dead, then why are we being warned of a looming mass extinction, the worst since the dinosaurs? And how can we be sure that a species has completely died out, leaving not a single individual anywhere in the world? In some cases, it seemed to me, when the only evidence was an owl pellet, there was reason to doubt that they had ever existed in the first place. It was like a door opening on to a maze with an enigma in the middle and a riddle at each corner.

  At this time I had little idea of what I was getting into. I knew only that the endless churn of species – discoveries, rediscoveries, extinctions – was something I would like to write about. Working on a piece for The Sunday Times Magazine, I asked the curator of mammals at the Natural History Museum, Paula Jenkins, if I could be shown specimens of some of the so-called ‘Lazarus species’ stored in her collection. Thomas Henry Huxley would tap-dance through the Central Hall if he could see how completely his vision for the museum has displaced Richard Owen’s worshipful celebration of the Old Testament. The exhibition space is just the smile on the museum’s face. The soul, brain and guts of the place are in the huge scientific body that stretches out behind it. Trolley squeaking like a tumbrel, Paula Jenkins leads me through endless back corridors, past numberless cabinets crammed with skulls, skins and skeletons. There is a vaguely hospital-like smell which intensifies as she opens a drawer and, from among the family Cheirogaleidae, lifts out the body of a tiny animal. It lies on the trolley with its arms pinned tightly to its sides as if it died while standing to attention. Like all museum specimens, it is gutless, boneless and scented with insecticide. Like many others in this faunal mausoleum, it is the holotype, the original collected item from which the species was first described. When Paula Jenkins turns it to the light, its babyish face wears an expression of pained astonishment. This is the hairy-eared dwarf lemur, Allocebus trichotis, which has lain in its drawer ever since a man named Crossley shot it in north-east Madagascar in 1875. Paula has worked at the museum for forty years but can’t remember anyone else ever wanting to see it.

  According to the late American naturalist Francis Harper, not a single living example of Allocebus trichotis was seen between 1875 and 1945, when Harper himself declared it extinct. This was not an arbitrary personal opinion but the straightforward application of a widely accepted scientific principle. It stood to reason, it was a fact, that any creature not seen for fifty years must have disappeared for ever. That was how extinction was defined. Goodbye, dodo. Goodbye, Allocebus trichotis. End of story. Then in 1967 came the miracle. A researcher in Madagascar reached into a hole in a tree and out came the hairy-eared dwarf lemur. It would prove, however, to be the very briefest of resurrections. Darkness closed again, and there was not another ‘official’ sighting until 1989, when WWF found it near the Mananara River. Crucially this time they took the trouble to interview the locals, to whom Allocebus trichotis was anything but a mystery. The bare facts of its existence were as follows:

  It was a very small animal – head and body typically between 125 and 145 millimetres, tail between 150 and 195 millimetres, weight between 75 and 98 grams. It was nocturnal and nested in forest trees, usually between three and five metres above the ground. Throughout the cold season, May to mid-October, it hibernated deep inside tree holes. All this, of course, helped to explain its supposed ‘extinction’ and to prove the inadequacy of the fifty-year rule. If you wanted to see Allocebus trichotis, then you would have to go and look for it. It wasn’t going to scuttle out of the forest and say, ‘Hi, I’m not extinct.’ Even the Madagascans saw it only between October and March, which is the tree-cutting season in the annual cycle of slash-and-burn.

  The next specimen on Paula Jenkins’s trolley is something that looks like an inflated shrew. Unusually, it is stuffed and mounted as if for public display – a vulgar, unscientific practice abandoned by the museum in the late nineteenth century (this one was collected in 1898). The Cuban solenodon, Solenodon cubanus, is from the outer fringes of the mammalian estate, where weirdness lies. It is a genuine primitive, similar in many ways to the early mammals that followed the dinosaurs. The long bendy snout looks frankly comical – a clown’s proboscis – though the naked, rat-like tail is less endearing. Less attractive still are its fangs, through which it can inject venom like a snake. You wouldn’t find Michaela Denis cuddling one of these, but then she almost certainly never saw one. By 1970, after none had been seen since 1890, the Cuban solenodon was officially declared extinct. It remained non-existent for just four years before confounding its obituary and reappearing in Cuba’s Oriente Province. Having no faith in apparitions or ghosts, science had to admit its error. Solenodon cubanus might be endangered, but it was definitely not extinct.

  The Natural History Museum has many other examples. Jentink’s duiker, whose skull is next on the trolley, was not seen alive between 1889 and 1948. The Cyprus spiny mouse had been lost for twenty-seven years before it popped up again in 2007. Fea’s muntjac went missing between 1914 and 1977. The thylacine has not been seen in the wild since 1933, though there are plenty of amateur enthusiasts in its native Tasmania (by no means all of them obvious hoaxers or wishful romantics) who are prepared to say otherwise. Reported sightings, including photographs and at least one video clip, comfortably outnumber glimpses of the Loch Ness Monster. More than all the other specimens I see on this visit, the two stiffened pelts Paula Jenkins now lays on the tumbrel bear a colossal weight of tragedy. The thylacine, popularly known as the Tasmanian tiger, was a gloriously improbable assemblage of unmatched parts whose scientific name Thylacinus cynocephalus (‘dog-headed pouched one’) precisely describes its uniqueness. It was a carnivorous, dog-like marsupial with exceptionally wide-opening, bone-crunching jaws and a conspicuously striped rump. It was likely to have been near-extinct on the Australian mainland even when the museum’s two specimens were collected in 1839 and 1865, but it managed to cling on in Tasmania. Even there, however, its taste for sheep made it anathema to farmers, who shot it on sight, and it would have taken a determined conservation effort to save it. Tragically, no such effort was made. The last scientifically validated individual was caught in 1933 and died in Hobart Zoo three years later. Since then – nothing. More than twenty-five scientific expeditions have done their best to confirm the amateur sightings, but all have ended in failure. The thylacine was declared extinct in 1982.

  Thylacine – the last known survivor died in 1936, but enthusiasts refuse to believe it is extinct. This one was photographed at London Zoo in 1913

  Next we head for the bovidae, the family of sheep, goats, cattle, antelopes and buffalo. Doubts about provenance are already raising questions about the very existence of some species – a line of thought that will lead directly to the golden mole, thou
gh it’s antelopes that come to my attention first. I am still a stranger to the idea that entire species might be open to doubt; that the evidence for their existence might be too flimsy to pass forensic scrutiny. The red gazelle, Eudorcas rufina, for example, has never been seen alive. Its entire classification depends on three mysterious specimens bought at Algerian markets in the late nineteenth century. According to the IUCN, ‘most authors’ have accepted it as a genuine species, though ‘continuing doubt concerning the validity of this taxon’ has persuaded it to change the classification from ‘Extinct’ to the more enigmatic ‘Data deficient’. None of the three specimens is in the Natural History Museum, but I have been expecting to see a similar rarity, the Arabian gazelle, Gazella arabica. Sadly there has been a crossing of wires. The evidence for G. arabica is even thinner than it is for E. rufina, and I am mistaken in my belief that I will find it in Kensington.

  In fact, the only known example of the Arabian gazelle is a single male specimen in Berlin. It was apparently collected in 1825, when it was reported somewhat dubiously to have come from the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea. Some scientists have suggested that the Red List classification of ‘Extinct’ should be changed, like the Red gazelle’s, to ‘Data deficient’. It is, they argue, illogical to classify as extinct a species which, in their opinion, never existed in the first place. Disappointingly I have muddled it with Gazella bilkis, which some authorities have classified as a subspecies of G. arabica. My mind whirls. A subspecies of a species that may never have existed? How am I supposed to make sense of that? Paula Jenkins tells me that the museum’s specimen is one of only five known to exist, all of which were collected in 1951 from Yemen – hence its English name, Yemen gazelle, or, more poetically, Queen of Sheba’s gazelle. Arguments about its status now are literally academic. ‘There is no doubt,’ says the Red List, ‘that the population originally described as G. bilkis is certainly now extinct, regardless of whether it was a species or a subspecies.’

  Moving from cabinet to cabinet, I am slowly adjusting to the idea that Mammal Species of the World, the Red List and all other attempts to gazette the world’s fauna are best guesses rather than audited accounts. Estimates of the total numbers of plant and animal species vary so widely that they look less like science than a soothsayer’s reading of entrails. Guesses roam between two million and 100 million, though most of them fall between five million and thirty million. Of these, only about 1.8 million have been described and catalogued, and only 3 per cent of these ‘known’ species have the benefit of IUCN status reports. Fifteen per cent of mammals are classified as ‘Data deficient’, meaning that we have very little idea of their range, number or chance of survival.

  Complicating matters further, ‘new’ species continue to turn up. Only a few weeks earlier, a previously unknown mammal had been named and announced to science and the world’s press. New Carnivore Discovered in Madagascar, said the headlines, over pictures of something variously described as ‘mongoose-like’ or ‘a scruffy ferret’. The holotype, consisting of empty skin, bare skull and mandible, now lies in a box in Paula Jenkins’s office. It is small – only slightly larger than the hairy-eared dwarf lemur – but in death, with its fluffy tail and grizzled pelt, it looks rather sleeker than it did in life, a masterpiece of the mortician’s art.

  This is Salanoia durrelli, or Durrell’s vontsira, named for the eponymous Gerald, late naturalist, founder of Jersey Zoo and author of My Family and Other Animals. It comes from the wetlands of central eastern Madagascar, where it feeds on small mammals and fish. Only three have ever been identified, which – taking account of the limp skin now lying in front of me – leaves exactly two recorded in the wild. The unavoidable suspicion is that its discovery has only narrowly preceded its extinction. Like the dwarf lemur, which vanished again in 1989, it is one of the most endangered species on earth.

  Even quite large animals can live beyond the reach of science. It was only in 1992, for example, that the saola, the uniquely beautiful antelope Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, was discovered among the Annamite Mountains of Laos and Vietnam. Then in 2010, in northern Myanmar, a team of international scientists happened across the previously unknown Myanmar snub-nosed monkey, Rhinopithecus strykeri. Let’s not forget that the gorilla was first described only in 1848, and the okapi not until 1901 – extraordinary given their size, distinctive appearance and the intensity with which Africa had been searched. It is this very uncertainty that keeps alive the hopes of the thylacine-hunters and the indefatigable friends of Nessie. Their optimism holds a strange echo of religious faith – just because you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Or, as scientists prefer to put it, absence of proof is not proof of absence.

  Of course animals are ‘new’ only in the sense that America was new when Christopher Columbus bumped into it. Local people in Myanmar were as surprised by the scientists’ ignorance of the snub-nosed monkey as the scientists were by its discovery. The peculiar nasal arrangement that gives the species its name makes the animals easy to find in the rain – water trickling into their upturned nostrils makes them sneeze. The one predictable thing about evolution is that it is very, very slow. New species do not pop up like mushrooms. Nor do they last for ever. Mammals typically survive for around a million years, though some may hang on for as much as ten times longer. Vague though this may be, it provides the basis for a bit of simple arithmetic. Given that there are around 5,000 known mammal species in the world, the extinction rate on average should be around one every 200 years. Over the last four centuries that rate has been exceeded by a factor of nearly forty-five. Even if a third of those missing did walk back out of the jungle, it would still be a catastrophic rate of loss.

  Confusingly, too, ‘new’ species sometimes are just old ones in a different guise. Science is always revising and reappraising itself. Re-examination with new techniques may show that what was once thought to be a single species is actually several different ones. Thus the number of species increases, but the number of animals remains the same. This ‘lumping and splitting’ has been most dramatic in birds, where the list of species since the 1970s has soared from 8,600 to around 10,000. Albeit on a smaller scale, it has happened with mammals too. The echidna is a good example. Truly this is one of nature’s strangest, a spiny, tube-nosed native of Australia and New Guinea, which, with the single exception of the duck-billed platypus, is the only mammal known to lay eggs. For years it was thought that there were just two species – short-beaked and long-beaked. Then scientists began to argue. Some reckoned that the long-beaked was not one species but six. Eventually, in 1998, they settled on three. All now are listed by the IUCN as critically endangered. One of them – Sir David’s long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi, named after the world’s favourite naturalist – must count as one of the rarest creatures on earth and, as we shall see later, has recently achieved a somewhat ambiguous celebrity of its own. The entire species is known from just one individual seen in 1961. But even this disqualifies it as the rarest ever recorded. At least it has been seen alive. The Somali golden mole exists only as a fragment in an owl pellet.

  Bending over the tiny skull of Durrell’s vontsira, I realise that questions of existence and identity are far more complex than I have understood. The old-fashioned fifty-year extinction test – not finally abandoned until 1995 – was patently absurd. The Somali golden mole – any number of rare or uncatalogued small animals – might inhabit the thorny tangles around my garden, and I would have no idea they were there. I have never systematically looked. Nor, I would guess, has any previous occupant of this land, reaching all the way back to the Neolithic. Extend that thought to all the thorny tangles, remote forests, hidden valleys, plains and mountains of the world, and one can see why science is so imprecise. It is like one of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknowns’. We know that in scattered populations or discrete enclaves in every continent, old species must continue to outlive their apparent deaths and ‘new’ ones remain undisco
vered. We don’t know what or where, and we don’t have the resources to find out.

  Back at home I return to the document that first pricked my interest – ‘Correlates of rediscovery and the detectability of extinction in mammals’ (authors: Diana O. Fisher and Simon P. Blomberg of the School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland). It tells me that 70 per cent of ‘purportedly extinct’ mammals are known from fewer than five historic sightings. This is why the IUCN’s extinction criteria now rest on search effort rather than time-lag. Now a species cannot be written off until there have been ‘exhaustive surveys in known and/or expected habitat, at appropriate times, throughout its historic range . . .’

  Resources for this kind of thing are limited, and there is a bias towards large iconic species that engage the public interest. By 2010, as we have seen, at least twenty-five qualified search teams and many more amateurs had mounted expeditions in search of the thylacine. The wild horse, Equus ferus, had been sought twenty-two times since 1969; the kouprey, or grey ox, Bos sauveli, twenty-three times since 1986; and the baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin, Lipotes vexillifer, fifteen times in four years. As the authors point out, there is a serious risk of blind faith, of searches continuing long after the quarry is extinct.

  The great majority of missing mammals have been accorded little or no search effort at all. Calcochloris tytonis even now might be tunnelling away in Somalia, or it might not. Who could know? Somalia of course is a special case, a rogue state which is no place for rambling zoologists. But it is not alone in presenting difficulties. There are plenty of governments whose commitment to freedom does not stretch as far as inviting foreign scientists (aka ‘spies’) to explore their territories, and plenty of places where political obduracy is combined with remote and difficult terrain. It all militates against the small, the far-flung and the obscure – which of course is exactly what many ‘Extinct’, ‘Critically endangered’ or ‘Data deficient’ animals are likely to be. It will be a while before anyone invites us to adopt a pygmy spotted skunk, a Sulawesi warty pig or a Sundaic arboreal niviventer. As the conservation charities very well know, public interest is a powerful arbiter, and the public likes big charismatic mammals it can easily recognise. This is why the likes of thylacine, wild horse and grey ox have been so ardently pursued, and why public appeals are slanted towards megafauna. It is an obvious truth, too, that a big animal with a limited range is a lot easier to spot than a small one ranging widely, and that no amount of effort will reveal something that isn’t there. On the Queensland evidence, it is search No. 12 that marks the point at which persistence turns to folly. No lost species sought more than eleven times has ever been found.