A Most Singular Animal

It's not in my nature to bear a grudge.But being shot I take personally, particularly as I was pregnant at the time.I never got to see my kids, while my killer was catapulted to fame as a result of my assassination.What brought about this sorry state of affairs?The origins of my murder can be traced back to 1799, when my forebears first sailed to England as captives.In those days it wasn't possible for them to survive the protracted journey, so it was only their remains that arrived.The English hardly knew what to make of the corpses that washed up on their shores.Having drawn clear lines of demarcation between birds, reptiles and mammals, they suspected the cadavers, which combined features of all three divisions, were fake creations, stitched together by a playful taxidermist.You might wonder how they could possibly mistake our electroreception organ for a bird's beak, but you must remember we are dealing with a species of limited intelligence with only five senses.As more of my ancestors arrived in Europe, their authenticity was finally accepted.In 1803 they came to the attention of French comparative anatomist, tienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire, who concluded we were like mammals except that we laid eggs and lacked mammary glands.He created a new taxon on our behalf, the Monotremata, whose only other affiliate was a spiny ant-eating compatriot, the echidna.But Geoffroy's analysis was thrown into doubt twenty years later when Johann Meckel from Germany discovered that we did have mammary glands.Geoffroy wasn't convincedhow could mammary glands be of any use without nipples?That's when the rising star of British comparative anatomy, Richard Owen, entered the scene.He proposed that we and our echidna cousins could ooze milk from our mammary glands to feed our young.Geoffroy wouldn't change his mind and was lampooned by Owen's followers for his stubborn adherence to preconceived ideas instead of going by the evidence.Having shown Geoffroy was wrong on one count, Owen suspected he was wrong on the other: that we laid eggs.Instead, he thought our eggs hatched within our mothers.There had been reports of eggshells in our nests, but Owen thought such Aboriginal accounts untrustworthy.The only way to resolve matters would be to catch mothers in late stages of pregnancy, and thus prove that their young hatched within.He sent out requests for many of us to be shot and pickled: '100 would not be too many, if we could settle the long-disputed question.'To no avail.The question lingered until 1864, when Owen received a letter describing how a recently captured female had laid two eggs.However, he decided this wasn't proof: the trauma of capture had no doubt caused the pregnant mother to discharge her cargo in an untimely manner.