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Read an excerpt from Carnivorous
Nights.
Chapter 1: "A Peculiar Animal"
A few years ago we began visiting a stuffed and mounted animal
skin with something akin to amorous fervor. We didn't tell our
friends about this secret relationship. We feared they would think
it was unhealthy to be infatuated with a dead animal.
The object of our obsession resided at the American Museum of
Natural History in Manhattan. Best known for its towering dinosaur
skeletons and beautiful but creepy dioramas of gorillas and stuffed
birds, the museum also housed a library where we did research. On
the way there, we would walk through the perpetual twilight of the
museum's halls, passing meteorite fragments, African carvings, and
a life-sized herd of motionless pachyderms.
When exactly we first saw this magnificent animal is lost in the
recesses of memory, but we remember being instantly captivated by
its exotic form. We marveled at its still limbs, at its head posed
coyly downward, at its glorious Seussian stripes. It was a
taxidermy of a Tasmanian tiger inside a rectangular glass case, and
it was positioned in such a lifelike manner, its mouth curved in a
friendly canine smile, that we found ourselves feeling affection
for it as if it were a long-lost pet. It had 15 dark brown stripes
across the back of its ginger-colored coat, which is why it was
called a tiger, but the stripes were where that resemblance ended.
Its body was shaped more like a wolf's or wild dog's.
Discreetly tucked between the "Birds of the World" dioramas and
a man-jaguar monster carved in jade, the tiger did not seem to be a
very popular exhibit. Despite our own fascination, there was never
a crowd around it. Many visitors walked by without giving it a
glance. Admittedly, the tiger was not the museum's newest
attraction. In fact, it was an antique. A fading label said the
animal from which it was fashioned died in 1919.
As the months past, our attentions became more pointed. We spent
our lunch breaks in front of the tiger, admiring its doggish head
and wicket-shaped grin. We became so enamored that we began
daydreaming about it while we were supposed to be reading about the
mating behavior of horseshoe crabs in the library. Sometimes we
imagined our tiger stalking through a generic jungle habitat in
search of unknown prey, its bold stripes rippling through a scrim
of green. We often wondered if Tasmania was as unlikely and exotic
as the tiger itself.
Finally, we decided to do a background check on the specimen.
The museum, in addition to its main library, had avenues of
research normally off-limits to the public. But as nature writers
we could always talk our way behind the scenes. We made an
appointment to visit the museum's mammal library, and when we
walked in, it felt like we had traveled back in time or at least
walked on to the set of a period film. There were heavy wooden
railings, black wrought iron shelves, tiled glass walkways, and an
old dumbwaiter. Near the door, cabinets filled with yellowing
ledger books chronicled the mammalogy department's acquisitions,
starting in 1885. Each numbered entry, written in the feathery
black ink of a fountain pen, listed the specimen's scientific name,
where it was collected, the name of the collector, and when the
specimen was received.
We started to go through the entries, and it was daunting. There
were thousands of them. Not being 100 percent familiar with the
arcana of scientific nomenclature, we had to rely on fading
memories of Greek and Latin studied years ago. For example, Volume
5 of the mammal catalogue listed no. 32732 as the skull of
Loxodonta africana, an African elephant shot by Theodore
Roosevelt "East of Meru Boma, just north of Kenia." No. 27901 was
the skull of Rangifer pearyi, a type of caribou, collected
in the "Arctic Regions" by Commodore Robert E. Peary. No. 35185 was
the skeleton of another Loxodonta africana, this one a
circus elephant, donated by Barnum & Bailey. No. 35180 was the
carcass of Canis familiaris, a domestic dog (actually a
French poodle) collected at 62½ East 125th Street in
Manhattan and donated by a Dr. Blackburne. And finally there was
our specimen. No. 35866 was the body of Thylacinus
cynocephalus, donated by the Bronx Zoo in 1919.
We learned that the scientific name Thylacinus
cynocephalus meant "pouched animal with a dog head." And the
name thylacine (THY-luh-sine) was used almost as commonly as
Tasmanian tiger. We also discovered that the animal was a
marsupial, with a pouch like a kangaroo or a possum, and not
closely related to tigers, wolves, dogs, or any of the familiar
species it somewhat resembled. The museum's thylacine had been
caught in the wild on the island of Tasmania, brought to New York
on a creaking ship, and displayed at the Bronx Zoo for two years.
When it died, its body was sent over to the Museum of Natural
History to be preserved.
Taxidermy has always been a strange art. From old letters in the
library's files, we gathered that the zoo frequently provided the
museum with specimens of exotic animals. The zoo's first director,
William Temple Hornaday, had a strong interest in taxidermy, and
the curator of the museum's mammal department, J. A. Allen, had
provided him with arsenic to help preserve the bodies, pelts, and
skins. In this case, the tiger's skin had been skillfully stitched
to a wire-and-clay model and the result was an almost flawless
simulacrum of a Tasmanian tiger.
Out of a collection of more than 32 million specimens, the
Tasmanian tiger is designated one of the museum's fifty most
treasured items. Why? Because there are remarkably few specimens.
The Tasmanian tiger is presumed to be extinct. That makes specimen
no. 35866 rarer than a star sapphire, rarer than a Rembrandt.
The fact that our beloved tiger had a tragic past increased our
interest. This rare species had lived in Tasmania for thousands of
years and been the island's top predator. But when the British
colonized the island in the early nineteenth century, what had been
an ark, floating serenely in southern seas, became a deathtrap. The
tiger was considered a threat to the colonist's livestock and they
began hunting it down. A bounty was paid to anyone who brought in a
dead tiger---and by the early part of the twentieth century, the
Tasmanian tiger's population began to hang in the balance.
On September 7, 1936, at a small zoo in Hobart, Tasmania's
capital, a thylacine---the last one in captivity anywhere in the
world---passed away in the middle of the night. It's believed that
it died of exposure. Numerous searches were launched to replace it,
traps were set, but no more tigers, live or dead, were captured.
The Hobart zoo's thylacine became the proverbial "last tiger." For
the next fifty years, the searches continued, but no tangible
evidence of the tiger was uncovered. In 1986, the thylacine was
declared extinct by international standards. But this announcement
did not fully penetrate on the island.
In Tasmania, people continued to look for the tiger. What's more
people saw it. Multiple sightings of the thylacine are still
reported each year. It's seen chasing a wallaby, crossing a road,
running along the island's shore. These sightings raise a glimmer
of hope that the species survives. How bright that glimmer was we
didn't know. The thrill of such a sighting swept over us. We
imagined being in Tasmania and seeing a tiger gripping a dead
kangaroo in its mouth, racing past our flickering campfire deep in
the bush. We knew it was a long shot. But the tiger seemed to be
calling our names. ...
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