The case of the echidna's hind leg

 My friends and some careful readers may be aware that for the first half of this year, I have been engaged in writing about echidnas.

I explained how this came about in April, but I will add it here to save readers leaping around. I am a biologist by training, later a teacher and museum educator, and I now volunteer on land care in a sanctuary on Sydney's North Head. That said, I am best known as a writer of non-fiction for children, and it was in that role that I spoke in December 2020 at a kids’ lit function, where I described the adventures I had while rescuing an echidna from a locked drain in the sanctuary, a drain that was due to flood, that night.

It involved kneeling on a steel grille, handling a heavy, spike-covered echidna that was grimly hanging onto a steel ladder, putting me at risk of toppling head-first into a water-filled sump, but it was still amusing in hindsight.

Over coffee afterwards, three writer friends asked me, separately and within the space of a couple of minutes, if I was planning a book on practical echidna work for younger readers. My answers were, respectively, “Naaah”, “Maybe” and “You betcha!” My third and most convincing interlocutor started out assuming I would say yes, and before I could answer, she reminded me that most children’s books about echidnas are cloying, saccharine tales of how an anthropomorphic Eddie the echidna couldn’t play with balloons.

Those books aren’t about echidnas, they’re about overcoming disabilities, and while that’s socially useful, those books don’t advance the understanding of science or inspire curiosity about nature. I succumbed to peer pressure and launched into the work, though there would be less of the how-to stuff.

In January this year, the book was well under way, when a new paper in Nature caught my eye (I'm the sort of writer who stays on top of the facts).  This was the Zhou, Yang, Linda Shearwin-Whyatt, Jing Li. et al.  paper on monotreme genomics. Suddenly, the important story was too complex for young readers.

I may yet come back to do a kids' book, but the book I will start pitching to publishers next week is solid history and biology for intelligent adults. Part of the story is about how Europe (mainly London and Paris) learned about echidnas and how they reported them.

Sadly, some of the early reports got the hind foot wrong. The accepted wisdom now is that the monotremes were originally aquatic, more like the platypus, and had a trailing foot, like this dinkus that I sketched for the book.

This Pretre and Massard illustration from 1816 shows the hind feet as they ought to be, though some of the rest is fairly improbable, like the stance and the protruding tongue, which is normally very hard to see. Still, the artists got the feet right!

The next illustration is from the Illustrated Australian News for Home Readers, a sort of newsprint post card to be sent to relatives at Home, which meant Britain to recently arrived Poms.

The art work ought to have been prepared in Australia, and by then we had some excellent home-grown artists, but this was a truly sloppy bit of work.

So where did the error get started? George Shaw got it right in 1792, and when William Bligh (yes, the Bligh of Bounty fame) saw and sketched a freshly-killed one on Bruny Island in Van Diemen's Land.

As you can see from the small version of Bligh's sketch (seem here on the left), he had no trouble with the backwards legs, though that might have been dismissed by some. As a Vandemonian echidna, it would have been less spiny than the ones I see in Sydney.

Still, Waterhouse's 1846 A Natural History of the Mammalia, got the legs all wrong, so clearly. the word wasn't out there.

When you look at an actual animal, the feet are tucked in underneath, and can be hard to see, but over the past year, I have been gathering the evidence:

That brings me up to June 2021, when we were strolling through Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens, and came across a giant representation of an echidna. As it happens, I know that there were echidnas in the Domain and Gardens in the 1960s, but I don't think they are there now, so maybe the artist had no live model to work on. As you can see, the foot is on backwards!

I reported this singular factual deficiency, but was told "I don't think we'll bother to change it now". So I'm dobbing them in as anatomical sluggards.

Finally, added in September, here's my best hind foot shot so far, taken 7 September on a new youngster at North Head:

And here's another angle: