[NHCOLL-L:5186]

[Judith Price]

Interesting post on Wired Science: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/extinction-of-taxonomists/#

 

"We are currently in a biodiversity crisis. A quarter of all mammals face extinction, and 90 percent of the largest ocean fish are gone. Species are going extinct at rates equaled only five times in the history of life. But the biodiversity crisis we are currently encountering isn't just a loss of species, it's also a loss of knowledge regarding them.

"Scientists who classify, describe and examine the relationships between organisms are themselves going extinct. The millions of dollars spent globally on technology to catalog species may actually be pushing out the people we rely upon: taxonomists and systematists. We're like young children frantic to add new baseball cards to our collections, while the actual creators of the baseball cards themselves are vanishing."

Judith

Judith C. Price

Secretary, Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections

Assistant Collections Manager, Invertebrates / Gestionnaire adjointe des collections invertébrés

Canadian Museum of Nature / Musée canadien de la Nature

PO Box 3443 Station D / CP 3443 Succ <<D>>

Ottawa, Ontario K1P 6P4 CANADA

Tel.613.566.4263 / Fax.613.364.4027

jprice at mus-nature.ca

@nature_jcp

www.nature.ca <http://www.nature.ca/>  / www.spnhc.org <http://www.spnhc.org/> 

 

 

 

 

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