Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello review - brilliant essays on immortal beasts

The meanings of Dürer's rhino, Mozart's starling, Darwin's tortoise and others explored with wild imagination and pyrotechnic proseElena Passarello starts this extraordinary book with the image of Yuka, a woolly mammoth chiselled from the softening permafrost by Siberian tusk hunters in 2010. First a rounded hoof comes into view, then a hollowed-out eye and finally the flank still bearing evidence of the gash that must have done for young Yuka - she was no more than 10 years old when she died - nearly 40 millennia ago. Most surprising of all, though, is the burning smoulder of her pelt, which has kept to its unconvincing ginger-red despite the passing centuries. Whoever knew that woolly mammoths shared their hair colour with dime-store dolls?As Yuka is flopped on to the snowmobile it is not her odd dislocations - most of her spine is gone although her legs remain rigid - that qualify as one of the "curious poses" of the book's title (taken incidentally from a line in "When Doves Cry" by Prince). It is what happens next, Passarello suggests, that stretches and shrinks Yuka into something truly strange. First she becomes the object of hard financial bargaining as the tusk hunters hide her carcass in a frozen cave and wait for the highest bidder. Then, when the scientists finally get their hands on her, she morphs into the poster child for a "rewilding" initiative that aims to make extinct breeds live again by splicing their ancient DNA into the embryo of their nearest living relatives. Continue reading...