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| Elysia chlorotica |
Here is an earlier version of my post for CultureLab at New Scientist:
Bestiaries – compendia of stories
about real and imaginary animals – are among the great artistic
achievements of the European High Middle Ages, as notable for their
gorgeously illuminated images as they are for their strange
conjoining of fantastical supposition with religious and moral
instruction.
The panther, for example, is a
brightly-coloured beast from whose mouth comes a sweet odour, as if
it were a mixture of every perfume. “Other animals, hearing its
voice, follow wherever it goes because of the sweetness of its scent.
Only the dragon is seized by fear and flees into the caves beneath
the earth.” In the accompanying illustration, gold leaf depicting
the air around the panther's mouth is ribbed and waved in such a way
that it appears to move as you turn the page. “Thus,” continues
the text, “our Lord Jesus Christ, the true panther, descended from
heaven and saved us from the power of the devil.”
Other depictions are less elevated. The
Bonnacon, which resembles a bull, has curved-in horns that are no
good for fighting so it saves itself from its enemies by
projectile-evacuating a long stream of acrid excrement. Scores of
other animals, many of them chimerical combinations of real ones,
fill these pages.
Through the Renaissance, the scientific
revolution and into the modern age, myth and legend have given way to
new discoveries in the real world. The realm of wonder has expanded
to include ever more real creatures that were previously unimagined
by Europeans and that often no less extraordinary than those depicted
in a medieval bestiary. Think what it must have
been like to have seen a platypus – an egg-laying mammal with a
snout like a duck – for the first time. Over the centuries,
cabinets of curiosities, zoos and botanical gardens and wildlife
television documentaries have helped to meet our insatiable appetite
for novelty and our desire to have better sense of what, beyond our
own pressing daily concerns, the world contains. You need only open
the pages of a magazine such as New Scientist in any given week to
learn of some astonishing discovery that casts light on one or
several of the endless forms most
beautiful – and passing strange – that have been, and are being
evolved.
Life
– a work in progress, a constant experiment – has its own
Ig Nobels: creatures which no sane creator could have imagined, and
which make you laugh, or gasp in astonishment, and then make you
think. Consider the leafy seadragon, which looks more like seaweed
than seaweed does and is at the same time unutterably weird, or the
sea slug Elysia
chlorotica which
photosynthesises with genes stolen from the algae it eats and is as
green as a leaf. Marvel at the barreleye fish, whose eyes facing
upwards underneath a transparent dome like the seats in the cockpit
of a helicopter, or the Giant tubeworms that thrive in scorching
black sulphurous smoke on the seabed and which are taller than men
but have no digestive tract. Dive into deep time and picture the
pterosaurs – featherless flying reptiles that in some species grew
as big as giraffes and had crests on their heads at least as big and
probably as colourful as anything at the Rio carnival.
Bestiaries
are full of allegory and symbol because, for the medieval mind,
everything was believed to embody a religious or moral lesson.
Thinkers and scientists such as Hume and Darwin discredited this way
of looking at nature. In at least two respects, however, the world
is becoming allegorical again.
Firstly,
as humans increasingly twist the world to serve our purposes and our
growing numbers we leave ever less space for other animals to evolve
independently. Secondly,
our ingenuity is making it possible to entirely
new organisms “from an idea rather than an ancestor”
as an
editorial in Nature
on the 150th
anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin
of Species put
it.
Medieval
bestiaries give a striking, delightful and sometimes hilarious
picture of a thirteenth century world-view. In some respects,
however, our own times are not so very different. We are still
animals that dream and for the most part seek meaning. We need to
dream uninhibitedly but act responsibly and with humility.
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