One of my Bad Habits

One of my bad habits as a question master is that I will often ask a question about places that I have just visited. It’s a bad habit because it means that those people playing who know me well are able to play the man and not the ball and say – well, he’s just come back from (insert city name here) – so that’s probably the answer. Case in point, it was my quiz last night and I did ask a question about Helsinki, being as I spent a week there back in September.

It’s a good place. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go abroad two or three times a year for the last decade. I take my sketchbook, and if I’m sat in front of a landmark in one of the capital cities of Europe, sketching away, then I’m really in my happy place. It isn’t just about sketching though. It’s mostly capital cities that I’ve been to and if the city has a tram system then I’m riding on it. Ditto metro/underground railways. Another thing that I love to do is visit Natural History Museums.

It goes back to being a dinosaur-obsessed kid growing up in West London in the early 70s, where one of the world’s great Natural History Museums – THE Natural History Museum – was only 11 stops along the Piccadilly Line. (It’s not so many stops now, because back in those days all the trains on the Piccadilly stopped at all 4 stops between Acton Town and Hammersmith. They don’t now.) But in the last ten years, if a city I’m visiting on a sketchpedition has a Natural History Museum then I’m visiting it. I’ve been to a lot and to be fair, they really have come in a variety of sizes and styles. The smallest and probably the most disappointing was Tallinn in Estonia, which was my first expedition of 2026. The collection seemed smaller than in many general museums I’ve seen and seemed to concentrate on the natural present than the natural history. On the other hand the American Museum of National History in New York City was completely out of this world, and the Berlin Museum of Natural History was highly impressive too. Helsinki’s sat somewhere between those two poles. It made an. Impression on me for two reasons. Firstly, because the exhibits seemed posed to highlight just how red Nature is in tooth and claw- the school party visiting at the same time lapped up the gore. (Not literally – that would be gross.) The other thing, though, was the skeleton of a Steller’s Sea Cow on the ground floor.

The Steller’s sea cow was a large, ocean-going mammal, related to the smaller dugong. Now, let me quote a few facts at you. From when it was first noted by Europeans (the explorer Jacques Cartier) in 1534 it was 280 years before the North American Passenger pigeon became extinct. The Thylacine – sometimes called the Tasmanian Tiger- was first noted by European settlers in 1772. The last one (probably) died in captivity in 1936 – 264 years later. The dodo – poster boy for animals driven to extinction by thoughtless Europeans – was first noted by Dutch explorers in 1598, and were all gone within about 70 years.

Having said all that, then, if I were to tell you that Georg Willhelm Steller first described the eponymous sea cow in 1741, how long do you think it was before the species were deemed to be probably extinct? Well, it was a lightning quick 27 years. In the interests of fairness, I should probably admit that the dodos were thriving when Europeans arrived on the scene, while it’s believed that Steller’s Sea Cow was already a dead clade walking by 1741 when Steller first recorded it. If you’re not familiar with the term, well it means basically a species that have not yet become extinct, but one where the population consists of such a small number of individuals of limited genetic diversity that extinction is virtually assured. Some scientists have estimated that there weren’t more than 2000 individuals left by 1741. So their demise can’t necessarily be blamed solely on the actions of Europeans, although it’s probably fair to say that the willingness of seagoing fur traders in the Bering Sea to hunt them and use them as an all-you-can-eat buffet in the 1750s and 60s probably hastened their demise.

I love learning about stuff like this. I don’t think that I’m the only one either. However, it’s one thing being fascinated by animals whose extinction was (largely) caused by human activity. It’s totally another thing aiming to ‘bring them back’ though. Back in the mid – late 80s I remember watching a feature on a TV show that might have been QED (but I can’t be sure) about the Quagga Project. The Quagga was, until recently, thought to be a species of equine similar to a zebra but with the distinctive striped markings only on its head, neck and parts of its legs. Human activity meant that the once huge population declined until the last individual died in Amsterdam Zoo in the 1870s. Research using mitochondrial DNA from tissues from museum specimens showed that the quagga wasn’t just like a zebra, it actually was a subspecies. This gave birth to the quagga project. In simple terms the Quagga Project in South Africa aimed – in fact still aims – to selectively breed individual Burchell’s zebras that have what are described as quagga -like traits, to recreate a quagga. Except, of course, that it won’t be a quagga. It may look like a quagga, it may walk like a quagga and it may sound like a quagga, but it won’t actually be a quagga, because no quagga survived to pass on its DNA . To be fair the project publicity has been quite open about this, but still. So what they are doing is not a million miles away from what has been done with thoroughbred racehorses in the past. Although a quagga-like equine has yet to win the Grand National.

Then there’s the project to ‘clone’ a Woolly Mammoth. A few years ago a company called Colossal Biosciences announced their ambition to clone a woolly mammoth. Except, of course, they can’t. What they plan is to use cloning and gene editing technology to create an elephant-mammoth hybrid. And if you think that this sounds like pie in the sky, as I did, then consider that last year Colossal Biosciences announced that they had used the technology to create Woolly Mice – mice with essentially mammoth hair – through gene editing. Now, there’s a world of difference between this and selective breeding to reinforce genetic traits over a number of generations. And to be honest, I find it rather unsettling. Yes, I do think that as human beings we have a lot to answer for to our fellow creatures, and yes I do feel very sorry for those creatures driven to extinction long before their time. But it seems to me that the two approaches – the almost quagga and the ersatz mammoth aren’t actually bringing anything back, they’re creating something different. I’m minded of Jeff Goldblum’s character in the first Jurassic Park film saying that the scientists were so caught up in the whether they could that they didn’t stop to think about whether they should. And let me ask you this? How much of a step is it from a mammoth-elephant hybrid, to a T-Rex, chicken hybrid? You know what I’m talking about.