All that glisters is not gold.

Aberdeen University opened a new museum today in the heart of Old Aberdeen, opposite the historic King's College Chapel. The opening exhibition is 100 Curiosities where a hundred people were invited to select a favourite object from the University collections and to write a caption of 100 words to explain its significance. I was one of the fortunate 100 and chose as my object a fossil Mesosaur. Unfortunately I went off at half-cock and blipped it some time ago! So, let me tell you about the specimen that would have been my second choice, the Cape Golden Mole (Chrysochloris asiatica) a small, insectivorous mammal belonging to the the family Chrysochloridae, the golden moles.

Golden Moles occur only in Sub-Saharan Africa, and nowhere else in the world. The Cape Golden Mole is found in the southwestern Cape from the Cape peninsular region extending up the Namaqualand coastal plains to Port Nolloth. You might well be wondering why an animal that is found only in Africa should be given the name asiatica. The reason is that when Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus named it, in 1759, he was working from a specimen erroneously labeled as coming from Siberia.

Cape Golden Moles are small, blind, desert living, insectivorous mammals, and are not closely related to the European moles, which belong to a different family, the Talpidae. Their minute eyes are overgrown with skin but they can distinguish between light and dark. The long clawed toes of the fore-legs are adapted for digging and the moles normally burrow just below the sand surface in their hunt for invertebrate prey, leaving a distinctive humped trail on the surface of the dunes.

Golden Moles have a soft, dense, silky coat which is coloured blackish to slaty-grey but shot through with a pronounced sheen of gold, bronze, green or violet, hence their name. William Shakespeare got it spot on in The Merchant of Venice ....