Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

41 But what was now to occupy his mind for the rest of the summer was his second trip for the Daily Express , ‘in search of the giant sloth’, which somewhere along the way had acquired a scientific appellation of mylodon. This time it was to be a major expedition rather than a solitary adventure. It is as well to remember that when he set out for Patagonia, in southern Argentina, in August 1900, Hex was still only 23 and was about to take charge of the logistics of a substantial operation with purportedly scientific motives, even though providing a colourful account for the Daily Express was the main thing. Hex said in his introduction to his book, Through the Heart of Patagonia that ‘Mr C.Arthur Pearson most generously financed the expedition in the interests of science.’ Pearson’s enthusiasm had been aroused when an Argentinian naturalist and explorer, Francisco Moreno, had brought fragments of the skin of a mylodon to the British Museum in London for safekeeping. (It is now held by the Natural History Museum in London.) In a lecture to the Royal Society on 17 January 1899, he said the animal was long extinct. Dr Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of palaeontology at the museum, said, however, that the skin was so fresh that, were it not for Dr Moreno, he would have ‘no hesitation in pronouncing the animal recently killed.’ It would seem that it had been found in a cave which had preserved it, as subsequent carbon dating of the fragment of skin suggests it was about 10,000 years old. Portsmouth and Patagonia Artistic impression of the mylodon robustus which Hex went to Patagonia to find after his 1900 cricket season. Modern dating techniques show that it last existed about 10,000 years ago.