The Hunt for the Golden Mole Read Online Free

of the Subclass Prototheria (all other living mammals belong to the subclass Theria). McKenna and Bell (1979) divided the order into two (Platypoda and Tachyglossa); the date of divergence of the two living families is unknown, and conservatively they are retained here in a single order.
    Reading on, I realise we’re talking about echidnas and platypuses, but I realise also, from the profound depths of my ignorance, that scientific detail is going to be hard on the digestion. Then – glory! – I remember Alfred Russel Wallace, for whom much of the world truly was a blank canvas, and I return to him as to a kind of intellectual comfort blanket. Let me begin where he began, and be led from there through zoological history.What were the ‘very peculiar forms of mammalia’ that struck him so forcefully in tropical and southern Africa? ‘Such are the golden moles, the Potamogale, and the elephant-shrews . . .’
    Golden moles . I turn back to Mammal Species of the World , and claw my way to page 77:
    SUBORDER CHRYSOCHLORIDEA Broom, 1915
    COMMENTS: MacPhee and Novacek (1993) erected the suborder Chrysochloromorpha for golden moles, but following Simpson’s (1945: 32–33) nomenclatural principles for categories above superfamilies, Chrysochloridea is the senior synonym.
    Chrysochloridea it is, then. There are a good few of them – many more, I suspect, than even Wallace would have imagined. Most, but not all, have common as well as Latin names, usually in honour of their discoverers, territories or physical peculiarities. First up is Arend’s golden mole, then Duthie’s, Sclater’s, Cape, Stuhlmann’s, Visagie’s, Giant, Rough-haired, De Winton’s, Van Zyl’s, Grant’s, Fynbos, Hottentot, Marley’s, Robust, Highveld, Congo, Yellow, Somali, Gunning’s and Juliana’s. Their territories range all the way down from the Gulf of Guinea, scene of Hanno’s first brush with the Gorillae , through equatorial and sub-equatorial Africa to the Cape. But there are two exceptions, which, weirdly, appear to have no ranges at all.
    Visagie’s golden mole ( Chrysochloris visagiei ) – ‘known only from the holotype’.
    Somali golden mole ( Calcochloris tytonis ) – ‘known only from the type specimen’.
    By now I know that ‘holotype’ and ‘type specimen’ are the same thing. In each case they mean the original collected example from which the species was first described and introduced toscience. What we are being told is that, throughout the whole of the scientific age, Visagie’s and the Somali golden moles have each been seen only once. One animal constitutes the entire species. Conservatively, their status is recorded as ‘critically endangered’. I will discover later that, though this degree of rarity is not a common phenomenon, it is not a rare one either. An astonishing number of species are accorded their identity on astonishingly sparse scraps of evidence. I turn next to the world authority on extinction and survival, the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List of Threatened Species .
    It confirms that Visagie’s golden mole is known from a single specimen collected from the Northern Cape and described in 1950. We do not learn whether the animal was alive or dead, or even complete in all its parts, but a few drops of scepticism leak through the author’s dry academic prose. ‘Several field trips to ground-truth the occurrence of this species have yielded no specimens, or even signs of golden moles, suggesting either an error in recording provenance, or that the original specimen was transported there by anthropogenic means or even perhaps floodwaters of the Renoster River . . .’
    If that is peculiar enough, then it’s nothing to compare with its Somali cousin. Again the Red List confirms the uniqueness of the specimen, found at Giohar, Somalia, in 1964. But