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, Étienne 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 convinced – how 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.

Owen had to wait another 20 years to see the matter resolved. In September 1883, when Owen was 79, William Hay Caldwell, arrived in our country. Caldwell was a Cambridge PhD student in the growing field of evolutionary embryology (Evo-Devo as it was later called). By that time, mammalian eggs were known to undergo holoblastic cleavage (division of the entire egg cell into blastomeres), in contrast to bird and reptile eggs which undergo meroblastic cleavage (partial division of the egg cell). Enlisting the help of Aboriginal people, Caldwell shot more than 70 of my sisters in his hunt for pregnant mothers but without result. Then, in the week of 24 August 1884, he shot me. I had already laid my first egg, but the second was in the mouth of my uterus. On 29 August Caldwell sent a telegram to Professor Liversidge of Sydney University: ‘Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic.’ We lay eggs harbouring reptile-like embryos.

On 2 September , the telegram was read to the British Association meeting in Montreal by Professor Henry Moseley, who said that: ‘No more important message in a scientific sense had ever passed through submarine cables.’ The same day, Wilhelm Haacke, Director of the South Australian Museum, presented specimens of echidna eggs at a meeting of the South Australian Royal Society, showing that our cousins also laid eggs.

How did Owen respond to these internationally recognized revelations that showed he was wrong? Did he refuse to accept unpalatable evidence, as Geoffroy had done in the debate over mammary glands? In December 1884, three months after Haacke's demonstration that echidna laid eggs, Owen published a paper in which he claimed to have anticipated Haacke's findings and thus resolved the mystery of monotreme reproduction. He had examined pregnant echidna specimens, received in 1880 and 1882, several years earlier than Haacke or Caldwell published their results, and shown that they laid eggs.

This wasn't the first time that Owen had done a volte-face. Having first written a scathing review of Darwin's Origin of Species, he changed tack as Darwin rose to fame, and tried to claim that Darwin had stolen his idea.

Herein lies one of the mysteries of this curious creature. A creature that claims to be the unacknowledged anticipator of seminal ideas, while having derided those same ideas before they became fashionable. Truly, a most singular animal.

Postscript Since receiving this essay we have lost contact with Tsuku Mogami. We are unsure whether Tsuku has adopted the form of animal, vegetable, mineral or conceptual, but wish Tsuku well wherever and whatever he, she or it may be.

Read other ‘Developmental Twists’ by Tsuku Mogami

https://journals.biologists.com/collection/8972/Developmental-Twists