From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Elephant Shrew (Macroscelididae family) is not a shrew. It is more closely related to the elephant than to any shrew in any field guide the author has used. It belongs to Afrotheria, the superorder that diversified on the African continent during its long geological isolation. The elephant, the hyrax, the aardvark, the golden mole, the tenrec, and the elephant shrew: all Afrotherian. All more closely related to each other than to the animals that share their names. The elephant shrew has a long flexible snout genuinely reminiscent of a small trunk, runs at twenty-five kilometres per hour, and maintains specific territorial paths through the leaf litter that it keeps meticulously clear. The author has been calling it a shrew. He notes that he has now written not a shrew in three different entries across this volume and is beginning to see the pattern.”

He had seen it dart across the path and written elephant shrew, small insectivore, shrew family.

This had been the standard entry: identification, size classification, assumed family. The entry had taken six seconds. The animal had gone.

“Not a shrew,” Cetshwayo said.

The Colonel looked up. The elephant shrew had vanished. He looked at his entry: shrew family.

“What family,” he said.

“The elephant’s family,” Cetshwayo said. “And the dassie’s. And the aardvark’s.”

The Colonel put down his pencil.

He read the taxonomy that evening. The superorder that had diversified on the African continent during its long isolation, before the continental drift brought it into contact with the Eurasian landmass. The elephant, the hyrax, the aardvark, the tenrec, the golden mole, the elephant shrew. All Afrotherian. All on the same branch of the mammalian tree, having diverged from a common ancestor and gone in vastly different directions: one to five thousand kilograms and trunks and decades of memory, one to twenty grams and a small mobile nose and paths through the leaf litter it kept clear.

The dassie, which the Colonel had written about in an earlier entry as the elephant’s remarkable small relative, was in this family too. He had encountered the elephant’s extended family at intervals throughout the volume and had been classifying them as rodents and shrews and small mammals of uncertain affiliation.

The family connection had been present throughout. The Colonel had been looking at the nose rather than the lineage.

He wrote: The elephant shrew is Afrotherian. The elephant is Afrotherian. The dassie is Afrotherian. The author has been walking with the elephant’s distant relatives for the duration of this volume and classifying them by analogy with European animals they do not resemble in the relevant sense. The nose is genuinely elephant-like and the name is not wrong. The taxonomy is simply better than the name suggests, and the author was not looking at the taxonomy.

He added: He is looking at it now. Twenty grams and twenty-five kilometres per hour and a twenty-million-year separation from the elephant. The family resemblance is in the nose and the lineage. The Colonel finds this adequate.

He sat for a moment and considered the family. The dassie, in the earlier entry, clinging to the koppie face with its rubbery toes. The aardvark, digging burrows for sixty-six other species before moving on without ceremony. The elephant itself, writing its family's name into the landscape every time it passed. And now this: twenty grams moving at twenty-five kilometres per hour through the leaf litter on legs that seemed too long for the body, maintaining territorial paths, keeping the paths clear, living the Afrotherian life at the scale of something that can dart under a leaf and be gone.

He had been meeting the elephant's family throughout this volume without knowing the family was assembled.

He wrote: The author notes that the elephant's family appeared in this volume in three entries before this one. He classified them separately as they arrived. He is now classifying them together. The elephant appears to have been the largest and most obvious member of the family that the author spent most of his attention on. The others were present the whole time at twenty grams, forty kilograms, and various intermediate sizes. The Colonel notes that this is how large families work and that the resemblance is, on reflection, visible across all of them if you know what you are looking at.