[Nhcoll-l] New species with long shelf lives

[Doug Yanega]

On 1/16/15 3:36 PM, Christopher Kemp wrote:
> Please post this request to the listserv:
>
> 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 cjkemp at gmail.com 
> <mailto:cjkemp at gmail.com>
>
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 - *since 1835*. 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.

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.

Sincerely,

-- 
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)
              https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__cache.ucr.edu_-7Eheraty_yanega.html&d=AwIC-g&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=CLFZJ3fvGSmDp7xK1dNZfh6uGV_h-8NVlo3fXNoRNzI&m=xsLStkcPAO_FDH5YMX2oli5OIhfwDZ4b0_1WltXRsTA&s=SxGpq6cNrScnd1MrPh2yrMODKcxBwGHuq22Hv_gQasM&e= 
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

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