All hail the Devonian nerds! The tiktaaliks and tulerpetons tossing back their flat heads, fuffing oxygen up through their watery tubes, eventually shedding their gills for skin, for open air, and still another infinity must pass as these miserable vertebrates scha-lump around the shifting plates until they at last settle the Karoo beds of southern Africa as bent-legged, flared-elbowed reptilians all mastering the art of double articulation, their planes of movement align, they hasten toward quickening until in their skulls a second bony palate is formed, foreshadowing the near-complete separation of food, of air, these therapsid temporal openings are migrating toward the top of the skull, and here’s the sagittal crest, the brain case and rostrum, they are the virgin class Mammalia, within which not long after emerges a clade of afrotherian mini-beasts, litters of sengis and tenrecs, shrews and hyraxes. Their tiny snouts toughen. Soft hides go real thick as the fur thins, showing off the tough hide, which is pinkish-yellow in hue, gleaming under the sun, and what’s there to eat, there’s nothing to eat, we must find something to eat, and so they dig. A hoof appears.

But the hoof is lousy at digging. It cleaves thrice and voilà! Lose the pollex, enter the claws, each a thick spoon. Enter the ears, long, soft and tubular. Enter the buccal snout, twice as long as a pig’s, half as long as an anteater’s, but it is not an anteater’s; this particular snout holds nine olfactory bulbs, best of anybody out there on the grasslands, stampeding the hot, bitchy savanna—and after another infinity, through the parallel evolution of a far less sturdy mammal, Modern Man, one of whom goes by the name Sir Richard Ostlet (but what are names), and Sir Richard Ostlet assigns to them in 1875 (but what is time) the order Edentata, “without teeth,” before realizing he’s wrong; the creature is, in fact, Tubulidentata. The teeth are there, at the back, by the throat. These dentine tubes, they serve the tongue, which is itself slender, protractile, and covered with a thick, viscous substance to which ants and termites clawed up from the ground will all, from here on out, helplessly adhere—

“Enter Orycteropus into the log,” Ostlet tells his assistant as he examines the claws. “That’s from the Greek. Do you know what it means?”

The young man shakes his head.

“Digging footed,” says Ostlet. “With the ears of a rabbit and snout like a pig. But what to call it?” He begins pacing. “Enter ‘the hare pig.’ The ears and snout tell us they’re guided by hearing and smell—No, wait. Enter ‘the ant bear,’” he says.

But that’s still not right.

He asks one of the African hunters what they call these beasts.

“Aarde vaarke,” the hunter says, and the hunter, black and handsome, does not know that his people adopted the word centuries ago from Dutch colonists as he points: “Earth pig.”

Ostlet nods vigorously. “Enter ‘the aardvark,’” he says, which the young assistant, a student of his in the Department of Naturalism at the University of Edinburgh, obediently enters.