The shark tooth has produced more jokes than its original owner could have ever consumed. I won’t try to add to them. Rather, the challenge is to write about the tooth and keep a straight face.
Which is easier than it sounds because David Attenborough’s gift was the perfect summation of his life work. It’s not so much the tooth itself, although that’s one hell of a story – even when abridged by a few million years.
It may well have come from Filfla, that blessed tooth. Desmond Morris had told me that it was Attenborough, his guest, who had persuaded him one morning to take his boat out to the island when he lived here in the late 1960s and that fossils were the one thing that had really fired up Attenborough’s imagination. So much so, he had spent a chunk of his short time in Malta sitting on the roof of Morris’s house (Villa Apap Bologna, in Lija) with his binoculars in hand, scanning what was then the surrounding countryside for promising rocks.
Filfla, with its piles of debris from naval target practice, must have been a fossil hunter’s paradise.
Be that as it may, Attenborough’s life has been all about gifting nature to people, through knowledge and images. His break came in 1954, when he was offered what to him was a dream job – to travel the world finding rare animals for London Zoo.
The adventures were filmed for the BBC’s Zoo Quest. It proved to be a hugely popular series that established him as a household name.
For good reason, too. His charisma and passion aside, Attenborough transported millions of people sitting in living rooms to places like Indonesia, there to experience animals like the komodo dragon and the orangutan. Here was an Alfred Russel Wallace for the 20th century, who made the most of the possibilities of the 20th century.
It’s only thanks to Attenborough and his teams that we’ve seen the birds of paradise, for example. The age of hypermobility has done little to render penetrable the dense and remote forests where they live. So unknown were these birds until fairly recently that they were believed to be legless and to drink nectar directly from the heavens. In some cases, it was Attenborough’s crews that captured their behaviour on film for the first time.
That’s the exotic made familiar but the familiar made exotic is equally of value. A couple of days ago, I spent an afternoon with friends at the Simar nature reserve. I was impressed at how their four-year-old seemed to find enchantment and curiosity everywhere he looked.
Books and online materials, and wildlife documentaries for that matter, can and often do help give meaning to that treasure. What they can’t give it is a soul- Mark Anthony Falzon
As we walked, he picked up leaves, twigs and stones. Pine and cypress cones, the latter promptly christened ‘little footballs’, seemed an endless source of excitement and komodo dragons had nothing on a small locust. For want of spare shark teeth, I later gave him a cowry shell from my collection for his collection.
Not quite a gift fit for a future king but one I hope he will treasure.
Which brings me back to Attenborough. In an interview with a newspaper some years ago, he said he thought it a shame that children were no longer encouraged to pick up and collect fossils, flowers and insects.
A reflection of his 94 years? Maybe. He will have been brought up collecting butterflies and bird’s eggs, as was standard practice into the 1960s. I’m sure that as a child he spent his rainy afternoons poring over the Observer’s series. I know I picked up quite a few numbers at Floridia’s bookshop in Valletta in the early 1980s. Times gone by, perhaps, but not necessarily retrograde.
I don’t think Attenborough was suggesting that children should be encouraged to spend their spare time terrorising tadpoles or decimating butterflies. Thing is, and rather helpfully too, nature does leave a trail of casualties.
Apart from cowries, I share my home with shrews, snakes, iridescent wing cases from beetles, strangely-shaped twigs, and such.
No animals were harmed in the making of my collection: they were all quite dead when I found them. And if my habits seem eccentric, they go back to a wonderful Mrs Zammit, who in Grade 6 organised a ‘nature table’ in a corner of our classroom. It was there that I caught the bug, if not particularly a knack for good puns.
Attenborough’s point is, then, that nothing can quite replace the tactile pleasure of handling a pebble or a shell and perhaps putting it away in a drawer as a personal treasure. Books and online materials, and wildlife documentaries for that matter, can and often do help give meaning to that treasure. What they can’t give it is a soul.
This, then, was no cheap photo op for Attenborough. It was actually a message to all of us, no matter how plebeian. By giving Prince George a shark tooth, and one with so much ancient and modern history at that, he gifted him a special encounter with nature. No one wants to be the subject of an impoverished king.