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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/16/15 3:36 PM, Christopher Kemp
wrote:<br>
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<div>Please post this request to the listserv:<br>
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Hi All, I'm currently working on a book project about
newly-described species with long shelf lives -- i.e. species
that were collected and then stored in a collection for
decades, or even a century or longer, before the specimen was
found and described. It'll be a large-format book with lots of
images and narratives of the discoveries. Should be a good way
to remind people of the importance of natural history
collections and biorepositories. But I need as many examples
as possible so that I can choose interesting species from
across as many orders as possible. So please let me know. It
can be a mouse or an exotic tick; a snake, or a weevil, or a
bird. Everything is equally valuable! Please email me with the
slimmest lead at <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:cjkemp@gmail.com">cjkemp@gmail.com</a><br>
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There is one point of clarification I'm curious to know here, and it
could have a rather large impact on your story-telling and
solicitation. That is, it is VERY common for new species to be
segregated out from among well-known and well-curated material in
collections, that have been sitting quite happily identified and
catalogued in those collections under a given name, unquestioned for
centuries in some cases. While this is especially common in insects,
it still does happen in vertebrates, such as the recent recognition
(in 2014) that the SE US alligator snapping turtles are a complex of
species, rather than a single species as had been assumed - <b>since
1835</b>. A very recent parallel example of an even older case in
insects is the segregation of the western populations of the
widespread, common citrus pest butterfly known as the Giant
Swallowtail [Papilio (Heraclides) cresphontes], described in 1777,
and effectively assumed to be a single species ever since (I say
effectively, because, being a butterfly, it has had numerous
subspecies described). As of December of 2014, every specimen of
"cresphontes" ever collected west of Texas (a total of probably
hundreds of thousands of specimens, in virtually every institutional
insect collection in the world) suddenly is classified as the
newly-described P. rumiko, some specimens of which date back to the
1700's.<br>
<br>
My point is that it sounds like you are looking for cases where
something was *unidentified* for decades - that is, it was just
sitting without a species name and then "found and described".
That's a pretty different scenario from a situation like the Giant
Swallowtail, one of the most easily-recognized butterflies in this
hemisphere (until 2 months ago), where the new species was sitting
in plain sight and very belatedly *recognized* as being new. If you
don't draw a distinction between these two types of discovery,
you're going to get inundated with examples like the swallowtail and
turtles. Cases like those, from a certain perspective, make taxonomy
look foolish ("How could they not realize that there were multiple
species all that time?"), and might not make for the most positive
impression, though it IS an accurate reflection of how science
operates.<br>
<br>
Sincerely,<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__cache.ucr.edu_-7Eheraty_yanega.html&d=AwMC-g&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=xsLStkcPAO_FDH5YMX2oli5OIhfwDZ4b0_1WltXRsTA&s=SxGpq6cNrScnd1MrPh2yrMODKcxBwGHuq22Hv_gQasM&e=">http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html</a>
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82</pre>
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