Star-nosed Mole

Specimens come from wet ground: the flooded peat and reed beds of the Great
Lakes basin and the marshland running north and east of it. The animal fits
in a closed hand, is near-black and permanently wet, and has forelimbs
oversized to the point of looking borrowed from something larger. Ringing the
end of the snout are twenty-two short fleshy rays, held in constant motion,
pink against the mud. The eyes are present but functionally useless. It
swims, tunnels and forages, often in the same minute.

The star is not a nose. It is a touch organ carrying more nerve endings than
a human hand, and it is used the way a hand is used — sweeping, contacting,
identifying. Timed in the laboratory, the animal locates a prey item, decides
it is food and swallows it in about a fifth of a second,
which is the fastest feeding response measured in any mammal. Underwater it
exhales a bubble onto an object and re-inhales it, which is how it smells
where smelling should be impossible.

Sealed, and retained as the plainest case in this collection. It was
catalogued in 1758 and sat in the record for two and a half centuries as an
ordinary mole with an odd face. What it was actually doing was not measured
until 2005.