In 1799 George Shaw, the head of the Natural History Museum in London, received a bizarre pelt from a Captain in Australia: a duck bill attached to what felt like mole skin. Shaw examined the specimen and wrote up a description of it in a scientific journal, but he couldn’t help confessing that it was “impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal, and to surmise that there might have been practised some arts of deception in its structure.” Hoaxes were rife at the time, with Chinese traders stitching together parts of different animals – part bird, part mammal – to make artful concoctions that would trick European visitors. Georgian London was becoming rather skeptical of these increasingly fantastical pieces of taxidermy.
Ewan's Blog: Bioinformatician at large
Musings on life science research by Ewan Birney, Director of EMBL-EBI.