The fauna
We should be pleased as punch that we get to share our Earth and our time with certain species.
It can be the lovely birds, dinosaurs transformed into a strange new form that sings and plays and mimics. And does things we want to think about less — the subtle warfare of the cuckoo upon the rest of his class.
It can be monarch butterflies, while they’re still around, majestic and fluttering through the air.
Our loyal pets, the dogs and the slightly more temperamental cats (except my cat, who is very stupid and just wants attention, food and some caves in my dinky studio. There is no guile between his eyes.)
But we can think of other stranger animals. Alligators and crocodiles, which on the surface seem like they’d be an ancient reptile, which to be fair, they are, in the millions of years sense, but in the grand scheme of things they are closer to when reptiles and birds split than to snakes.
It can be the other living fossils, the coelacanths and tuataras and lungfish and elephant shrews, whose shape hasn’t been greatly altered over huge spans of time, while humans are a few hundred thousand years old in the sense of sapiens and a few short million in the sense of Homo. We have a few cousins, the Denisovan and the Neanderthal, tucked within our bloodlines, but otherwise we have to look to the chimp and the bonobo to find a next of kin.
But I want you to love that we get to coexist with the monotremes.
These are an ancient lineage of mammals — the classmate you knew you were related to but weren’t sure how. Your great-grandfather’s cousin’s great-nephew? Can that be right? It only came out in a fifth grade genealogy project with last names so obscure that, in the geography you were in, it had to be a relation.
But they don’t look anything like you. Or at least they only do superficially. You definitely know one — the platypus, whose name sort of means “flat footed,” owing to their shape.
What a weird relative. It has a beak — a convergent evolution with the birds, given that our ancient, ancient relatives, the synapsids, mammal-ish reptile-ish things, split from reptiles and not some common ancestor with birds. Well, I mean, go back far enough, and sure there’s an ancestor, but it’s not a road diverging in a yellowed wood so much as a river system.
It lays eggs — tough, leathery eggs that wouldn’t make for a terribly great breakfast. Not to engage in after dark talk, but we have nipples and the marsupials have nipples and the monotremes have a god damn system of milk glands that just kind of ooze our of their skin and no, I do not want those qualities in ourselves.
Along with the duck billed platypus we have the echidnas, four species across two genus of anteaters. Remember the game Sonic the Hedgehog 3? The new villain Knuckles? He was an echidna which means he was hatched from a god damn egg and I don’t like knowing this.
They have different brains. They have genitals I do not recommend you look up over breakfast. The platypus, at least, has venom and electrosenses. Are they mammals, like we think of mammals, or are they a convenient grouping for an ancient relative to keep the class system confined? We haven’t had a common ancestor with them in 220 million years. That was the Triassic period, where primitive dinosaurs roamed the earth and the cunning velociraptor was so far away that life on Earth was barely hinting at them. The echidnas and the platypus haven’t shared an ancestor for a dozen million to a hair under 50 million years. If it’s the latter, primates were fairly fresh.
160 million years ago, we placental mammals split with the marsupials and went on our path away from whatever came before the pouch.
Species abound but classifications are fickle, and the evidence isn’t always in our form or are weird quirks. Mammals and birds developed warm-bloodedness separately, with cold blooded relatives separating us. The real proof is in our DNA, where we can make sense of our connections or lack of connections and make strange discoveries. We’re closer related to the rabbit or the rat than the dog or the bear. The bat isn’t really much of a rat.
When we think of sharing the Earth, we can think of the sleek. The charismatic. But we can, and should, think about the goofballs. The platypus and the roadrunner and remarkably ugly giant leaf-tailed gecko. When I think of extinction, I don’t always think of the rhinos. Sometimes I think of ancient lineages that are snuffed out by human hubris, or could be. I want it all, even the snakes.
But maybe, especially, the platypuses* and the echidnas.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
* Do not come for me on the pluralization of this. I do not care.