Showing that (some) people believed, say, the thylacine to be stupid and thus deserving of extinction strikes me as a redundant argument. The ‘weird’ nature of Australian mammals is a perspective issue, an othering, but this is a book full of such otherings. While pointing out the diminishing and demeaning terms used to describe Australian mammals, Jack Ashby-assistant director of the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge-often uses descriptors that I would ‘poetically’ argue trivialise or amuse, but seems unconscious of doing so. Ironically, for instance, in an argument against hierarchies (particularly of marsupials vs placental mammals), hierarchies are constantly deployed. This book says so many appropriate things, especially with regard to the toxic legacy of colonialism, but is a mass of contradictions I don’t think the author has fully processed. Ashby deals with these issues in a variety of-often contradictory-manners. ‘Primitive’ has been aimed at the Australian lands by European scientists (and others) in a process of reductionism and disdain deeply entangled in colonial opportunism. I am sure it’s an observation Indigenous Australians have made for tens of thousands of years. ‘Wombat’ is a Durag word, though ‘science’ claims to have recently confirmed that the reason why the bare-nosed wombat does ‘cube-shaped poos’ is territorial (so they don’t roll away). We learn that ‘puggles’ are the name of echidna offspring that drink milk from patches in their mother’s ‘pouch’. I write this having come in from looking at echidna diggings not far from my house. And echidnas are complex animals worthy of anyone’s respect. They are mammals that swim, dive, dig burrows, lay eggs and have an incredibly sensitive ‘bill’. Platypuses aren’t ‘weird’ and were never a ‘hoax’. In other words, Ashby misses the nationalism, the parochialism and the profiteering around this ‘weirdness’, which are sadly the only values that operate as generic ‘protections’ to these ‘Australian animals’. And strangely, the ‘weirdness’ that Ashby laments Australians applying to ‘their wildlife’ is probably the only reason anything has survived-because it’s seen as unlike anything anywhere else in the world. The outsider and insider views of Australian animals are less of a problem than the rapacious desire for wealth and power inside Australia, and the absolute ignorance and indifference to animals beyond their direct relevance or use to many people’s lives. However, Ashby’s argument that this disdain is embedded in a negative view of Australian animals inherent in the colonial ‘legacy’ is only part of a much larger picture of exploitation. In my view, all this is tied into the way Australian animals are represented to the outside world, and in Australia itself. Jack Ashby’s Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian is an argument about the wonders of Australian mammals and the Australian environment as a whole. … Sussan Ley, in one of her final acts as environment minister, removed the requirement for 176 plants, animals and habitats, including the Tasmanian devil and the whale shark, to have legislated plans designed to prevent their extinction.Ī new book considers the desperate need to stop this damage. There are no adequate protections of species, never mind individual animals, and extinctions are occurring at a horrendous rate. However, sometimes it’s important to think about where it all began: the fishy animals without which there would be no you, no me, no internet cats, and no platypuses.Australian governments continue to treat Australian animals with disdain. That has inspired my choice of specimen this week.Īs an Australian mammal nerd, it’s often tempting to think that nothing interesting happened between the appearance of multi-cellular life a little over 500 million years ago, and 200 million years ago when the first platypus-ish things appeared*. This term every week we have a palaeobiology class where the students learn about vertebrate life from the beginning – looking at each group in turn as they evolve in the fossil record. It’s also the start of winter term at UCL, and that means that Grant Museum returns to doing the very thing our collections were first put together for – spending the day teaching students about life. It’s the third birthday of the Specimen of the Week blogs, so this one is a special one, tackling one of the biggest events in global history (no exaggeration).
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