The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure: 'A rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson

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Like most burrowing mammals with similar habits, the Chrysochloridae have short legs with powerful digging claws, very dense fur that repels dirt and moisture, and toughened skin, particularly on the head. There’s bound to be animals one feels to have been unfairly overlooked, and I would have liked to see her on at least one bird of prey, or declining beetle, or endangered cat.

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The rhinarium is a greatly enlarged, dry leathery pad that protects their nostrils while the animal digs.If two species occur in the same area they tend to occupy different microhabitats, probably as a result of ecological displacement. The Golden Mole feels like a medieval bestiary, with its wide-ranging essays (some of which have appeared in the London Review of Books), its gorgeous illustrations by Talya Baldwin, and its invitation to pay attention to creatures that are “so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the edges of the truth”. Of the 21 species, more than half are currently threatened with extinction due to pollution and loss of habitat: if we lose them, we will have lost the world’s only rainbow mammal, a stupidity so grotesque we could not expect to be forgiven. Wolves get a bad deal: “the very first transformation scene in the work of the Roman poet Ovid is also the grisliest, and one of the earliest fictional accounts of lycanthropy”. In particular, golden moles bear a remarkable resemblance to the marsupial moles of Australia, family Notoryctidae, which they resemble so suggestively that at one time, the marsupial/ placental divide notwithstanding, some argued that they were related.

Golden mole - Wikipedia Golden mole - Wikipedia

Despite these superficial anatomical similarities to other fossorial small mammals, golden moles show many highly-specialized mammalian characters including: a unique hyoid-dentary articulation (Bronner et al.The adults are solitary, and their burrowing territory may be aggressively defended from intruders, especially where resources are relatively scarce.

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In comparison to true moles, the fifth digit is absent and the first and fourth digits are vestigial. The Golden Mole: And Other Living Treasure, which collects these pieces along with a few additions, can be read as a sort of modern bestiary. Their skin is thick and tough, particularly on the head, which contains a wedge-shaped muzzle with a leathery nosepad that protects the nostrils. Even more disturbingly, Rundell argues that extinction is “not just happening because of our inertia: it’s incentive-driven” – through a ghastly process known as “extinction speculation”. Individuals should be housed separately in containers (the size of which depends on the species concerned, but should always allow the construction of at least 1m of burrows) with rich soil or sand changed weekly.Like most other subterranean mammals, most golden mole species are restricted to a narrow range of habitats and environmental conditions, have very limited mobility and dispersal abilities, and specialized K-selected life history strategies. She points out that in Atlanta, Georgia, it is illegal to tie a giraffe to a streetlamp but not “to import a cushion made from a freshly shot giraffe’s head with the eyelashes still attached” because the US will not designate giraffes as endangered. A lavishly illustrated compendium of the staggering lives of some of the world's most endangered animals, The Golden Mole is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck – to fall for the likes of the wondrous Pygmy Hippo, the seahorse, the narwhal and, as astonishing and endangered as them all, the human. These qualities were on prominent display in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne , published earlier this year.