Paper short abstract:

This paper will trace the scientific transportation and testing of 'extreme creatures' - those thought to look peculiar, or inhabit extreme environments. It will consider how animal and knowledge were made mobile, as western scientists attempted to 'move closer' to understanding animal Otherness.

Paper long abstract:

Across the nineteenth century, western naturalists and scientists extracted creatures from their habitats, and moved them to the city, the museum, the laboratory. Here, their bodies were examined and tested. Animals at the extremes - both those that inhabited difficult to access environments, and those that seemed 'peculiar' - prompted urgent questions. How, these scientists mused, did such creatures experience the world around them? The British naturalist John Lubbock, writing in the 1880s, exclaimed: ‘how different the world may – I was going to say must – appear to other animals from what it does to us.’

This paper will trace the identification, transportation, and the testing of these 'extreme creatures' across diverse contexts and environments. Drawing on case studies from deep sea exploration and collection, to the dissection of the star-nosed mole, it will focus on the ways in which scientists attempted to understand these animals, and their sensory and bodily adaptations. But, more than that, it will explore how knowledge about the animal Other was made mobile, and transformed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as scientists attempted to 'move closer' to knowing these creatures. However, as this paper will argue, this often revealed more about the human animal, and their reliance on their own embodied experiences of the world, than it did about these 'extreme' creatures. Fundamentally, whilst scientists could look in greater depth, and harness new technologies to peer at their animal subjects, they could never know what it was to be that creature.