Bring Back the King by Helen Pilcher

Author:Helen Pilcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

In a Pickle

An Australian by birth, Michael Archer grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. As a child, he was more interested in the local wildlife than he was his fellow classmates. ‘I was a bit of a sociopath,’ he says. ‘I didn’t enjoy the company of people that much; snakes and turtles seemed much more reasonable to me.’ Then he discovered fossils in the rocks and boulders around his home, and a lifelong interest in the lives of animals long gone was born. He collected and stored all that he found in a special room in his house. Then one day, on a visit to New York, he heaved two fossil-filled suitcases up to the front desk of the American Museum of Natural History and asked someone to take a look. The late curator of invertebrates, Norman D. Newell, graciously obliged and identified his specimens for him. It was an act of kindness that inspired Archer to follow a career in science. He studied Geology and Biology at Princeton then, while a Fulbright Scholar at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, became intrigued by the museum’s collection of pickled Australian animals. Many of the specimens, he realised, had never been properly identified. ‘They were unknown to science,’ he says. It made Archer realise just how little was known about this cache of Australian biodiversity. For his PhD at the University of Western Australia, he studied carnivorous marsupials, including the thylacine, and went on, through much of his career, to catalogue many of the amazing finds from Riversleigh. But it was a visit to the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1976 that would change everything.

‘Staring down at me from a shelf full of skulls and skeletal tissue was a thylacine pup in a glass jar,’ he says. The pup had been acquired over a hundred years before by museum curator and collector George Masters. A Victorian ‘Crocodile Dundee’, Masters travelled widely through Australia and Tasmania, wrestling venomous snakes and shooting all manner of fauna to bring back for the collections at the Australian Museum. At one stage he had collected more than half of the museum’s natural history exhibits, and the thylacine was among them. Exposure to daylight and the alcohol it had been preserved in had long since bleached most of the colour from the tiny thylacine’s body, so the pup was white as a sheet. Only the faintest of stripes could be seen on its back. It lay curled up with its tail tucked under its bottom, its forepaws curled up as if begging. Wrinkly folds of skin hung loose over its podgy belly and its eyes were squeezed shut. Archer was mesmerised.

In the years that followed, he went to see the pup several more times. Because of his research interests, Archer realised better than most the pivotal role played by humans in the thylacine’s extinction. ‘We killed these things,’ he tells me. ‘We slaughtered them. What I think is important is that, if

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