For more than a century the central attraction of the Horniman Museum in London has been a too-large stuffed walrus. Victorian taxidermists, the story goes, had never seen a live walrus, so they simply kept filling the floppy hide until the creature seemed to fit its skin. The bloated specimen spends its days looking down on visitors with an erect and noble posture that it never held in life. Compared to the photogenic polar bear, the walrus, even one as smoothed for the camera as the Hornimans, makes an unlikely poster species for climate change. But cram the creatures together - 35,000 of them - on a remote Arctic beach, and impose a no-fly zone above to prevent the carnage of a stampede, and it is tempting to see them as the natural world's latest distress beacon to warn of the creeping chaos of global warming.
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