Tongan Giant Skink Tachygia microlepis. Original artwork from A Gap in Nature.

2000.
Watercolour and gouache on Arches paper, 430 x 355mm, framed, signed and dated by artist.

Last Record: April-May 1827. Distribution: Tongatapu, Tongan Islands.

The giant skink of Tonga was a magnificent creature that slipped into extinction before anything was known about it except the fact that it existed. Just two specimens survive, both pickled in alcohol in the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, where they have lain for nearly two centuries. They were collected by naturalists Jean Rene Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard on a voyage round the world with Captain J. S. C. Dumont d'Urville aboard the French corvette l'Astrolabe between 1826 and 1829. Dumont d'Urville was a fascinating if tragic figure. He seems to have been the Forrest Gump of his age, always being there at critical moments in history, usually in the company of the famous. One of his more memorable exploits was the discovery of the Venus de Milo. He was one of the few people to see her with arms, which were shortly afterwards lost in a tussle between French sailors and Greek brigands. He was also the only explorer from the days of sail to die in a train crash. After surviv-ing extreme vicissitudes at the ends of the earth he perished during a family outing to Versailles on a sunny day in early May 1842.
The Tongan giant skink were collected under the most trying of circumstances. During most of the Astrolabe's month-long stay in the Tongan Islands she was in imminent danger of shipwreck, having sailed too close to a reef on a lee shore. Dumont d'Urville paints a vivid picture of Quoy's activities at the expedition's moment of greatest crisis, when the Astrolabe's bow lay just three metres from the jagged coral, and was pitching so violently in the huge swell that her lower spars seemed to touch the menacing foam. Quoy's table was set up on the quarterdeck, Dumont d'Urville wrote, where the scientist:
went on with his work of analysis and natural history drawings ...and to see him calmly working away, one would have never guessed that at any moment Astrolabe could sink, leaving those on board only time to jump for their lives ...I encouraged him as best I could, pretending an interest in his research which at that moment I was incapable of feeling. But it was a way of hiding from the sailors the full extent of the danger that was threatening them.
The skinks were probably brought aboard by visiting Tongans, who traded with the naturalists through the worst of their peril. Perhaps Dumont d'Urville's pretended interest extended as far as the giant skink. If so he was one of just a handful of Europeans to see a fresh or living specimen. The timing and cause of their extinction is entirely unknown.