The African spiny mouse represents the first instance of skin shedding in a mammal in which molecular science and the imagination of our ancestors find a common home (A. W. Seifert et al. Nature 489, 561–565; 2012).

Stories abound of mammals that can shed and regrow their skins. A letter from the British scholar C. J. Grece to Charles Darwin in 1866 discusses the tale of a large black pig, reported in London's Morning Star newspaper (see go.nature.com/szb5df). Grece wrote that the pig “cast its entire skin from the snout to the tail, together with subcutaneous fat of from one to three inches in thickness, leaving a second skin now exposed to the external air. ... The former skin was black and bristly, the new one was, at first, entirely flesh coloured but is changing to black by degrees. ... [The pig] has now naught the matter with it.”

In mythology, a creature known as a selkie, for example, was supposed to shed its skin as it morphed from seal to human. In his Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling in 1902 described a rhinoceros that “took off his skin and carried it over his shoulder as he came down to the beach to bathe”. His neighbour, the Parsee, rubbed that skin with “tickly cake-crumbs and some burned currants” so that, unlike the insouciant pig described to Darwin, the rhinoceros was left “from that day to this” with “a very bad temper”.