Museums: The endangered dead by Christopher Kemp.
Ricardo Moratelli surveys several hundred dead bats — their wings neatly folded — in a room deep inside the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. He moves methodically among specimens arranged in ranks like a squadron of bombers on a mission. Attached to each animal’s right ankle is a tag that tells Moratelli where and when the creature was collected, and by whom. Some of the tags have yellowed with age — they mark bats that were collected more than a century ago. Moratelli selects a small, compact individual with dark wings and a luxurious golden pelage. It fits easily in his cupped palm.
To the untrained eye, this specimen looks identical to the rest. But Moratelli, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, has discovered that the bat in his hands is a new species. It was collected in February 1979 in an Ecuadorian forest on the western slopes of the Andes. A subadult male, it has been waiting for decades for someone such as Moratelli to recognize its uniqueness. He named it Myotis diminutus1. Before Moratelli could take that step, however, he had to collect morphometric data — precise measurements of the skull and post-cranial skeleton — from other specimens. In all, he studied 3,000 other bats from 18 collections around the world.
Myotis diminutus is not alone. And neither is Ricardo Moratelli.
Across the world, natural-history collections hold thousands of species awaiting identification. In fact, researchers today find many more novel animals and plants by sifting through decades-old specimens than they do by surveying tropical forests and remote landscapes. An estimated three-quarters of newly named mammal species are already part of a natural-history collection at the time they are identified. They sometimes sit unrecognized for a century or longer, hidden in drawers, half-forgotten in jars, misidentified, unlabelled.
…
A reminder that not all “big data” is digital, at least not yet.
The number of specimens already collected number in the billions worldwide. As Chris makes clear, many are languishing for lack of curators and in some cases, the collected specimens are the only evidence such creatures ever lived on the Earth.
Vint Cerf (“Father of the Internet,” not Al Gore) has warned of a “…’forgotten century…” of digital data.
As bad as a lost century of digital data may sound, our neglect of natural history collections threatens the loss millions of years of evolutionary history, forever.
PS: Read Chris’ post in full and push for greater funding for natural history collections. The history we save may turn out to be critically important.