Natural History Museums Are Teeming with Undiscovered Species

theatlantic.com

33 points·Hooke··3 comments

In response to the inevitable "No wonder they're extinct; those biologists in the 19th century were collecting them all indiscriminately". When they were collecting, these creatures were common as dust. And now these collections are the only way we know that some of these species existed at all.

In the excellent Bill Bryson book "A Short history of nearly everything", a well known researcher was supposed to have opened a case drawer in the London Natural History Museum and exclaimed "oh fuck not another phylum".

The issue is that there are simply not enough trained scientists to study all that can be studied.

Perhaps there is hope for us all once the robots take our jobs:-)

A friend of mine works as a beetle curator. Telling species apart is actually surprisingly difficult. He shot down a lot of my technical solution suggestions with ease. Genetic sequencing might work some day but it's not there yet (and they have a lot of specimens, like 10-20 million).

E.g. there is a species where each specimen looks very different (e.g. size between mm and cm) depending on how much food they consume. The best way to differentiate is often to extract the genitalia.

One thing the article doesn't explicitly mention but alludes to is that a lot of species we think we know may actually be different species, or just the same species with a different look. A lot of the descriptions are 50 years old and read "black body with six legs and a head". So all those need to be re-done at some point.

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