A zoologist’s exploits in Indonesia, with exotic beasts and wild men, reads like an adventure story. But in important ways, it is the real deal, says Simon Ings
Book
The Tomb of the Mili Mongga Samuel Turvey Bloomsbury: out now in the UK; 30 April in the US
IT MUST have been disconcerting for biologist Samuel Turvey as he hunted for fossils in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sumba between 2011 and 2014. He attracted the close attentions of “huge tail-less whip scorpions with sickening flattened bodies, large spiny grabbing mouthparts, and grotesquely thin and elongated legs”.
In The Tomb of the Mili Mongga: Fossils, folklore, and adventures at the edge of reality, Turvey shares more exotic animals and worlds. But why was an evolutionary biologist hunting fossils? The answer has to do with the dual nature of islands. Life, he says, “does spectacular, ridiculous, experimental things on islands, making them endlessly fascinating to students of evolution”.
Take New Caledonia, an archipelago that is about 1200 kilometres east of Australia and is a fragment of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana.
It boasts bizarre aquatic conifers and even shrubby parasitic conifers without any roots. Then there is Madagascar, which hosts the aye-aye – a primate equivalent to the woodpecker in its ability to penetrate wood in search of food.
My favourite in Turvey’s book of wonders is the now extinct cave goat Myotragus that lived on predator-free Majorca and Menorca. Relieved of the need to watch its back, it evolved frontfacing eyes, giving the creature the appearance of a person wearing a goat mask.
But island life is also incredibly vulnerable. The biggest killers by far are visitations of fast-evolving diseases. From the 16th to 19th centuries, exploration and colonisation by Europeans decimated human populations of Pacific archipelagos, as a first wave of dysentery was followed by smallpox, measles and influenza.
Animals brought on the trip proved almost as catastrophic. Contrary to cliché, Westerners on Mauritius didn’t hunt the dodo to extinction – rats did. And let’s not forget Tibbles, the cat who, along with her offspring, is said to have wiped out the Stephens Island wren in 1894.
There are lessons to be learned, of course. Islands may be treasure troves of evolutionary innovation, but most of their treasures are already extinct. As for conserving their wildlife, Turvey asks how, without a good understanding of the local fossil record, “we even define what constitutes a ‘natural’ ecosystem, or an objective restoration target to aim for”.
A tale of islands and their ephemeral delights would have made for an arresting book, but Turvey, an exc
