18 October 2017
Millions of animals unknown to science
languish in the world's natural history collections. Just open a forgotten
cupboard and you could find a new species
By Christopher Kemp
A COUPLE of years ago, Stylianos
Chatzimanolis received a box of insects in the post. The package came from
London’s Natural History Museum: Chatzimanolis was updating the classification
of an obscure group of beetles and – as taxonomists often do – had asked to
borrow some specimens.
The beetles had been collected long ago but
never formally described. They were just roughly classified as members of the
same genus, Trigonopselaphus. But when Chatzimanolis opened the box, he
could see that one of the 24 specimens clearly didn’t fit in. Long-bodied, with
a segmented, sinuous abdomen, it was much larger than the others and had a
distinctive, iridescent head.
As he read the beetle’s yellowed, handwritten
label, he realised the specimen had been collected in 1832 in Argentina by
Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle. Somehow it had never been
described. It was stored away unnamed, then disappeared into the museum’s vast
beetle collection. Finally, after 180 years in limbo, Chatzimanolis gave it a
name: Darwinilus sedarisi, in honour of Darwin and the writer David
Sedaris, whose audiobooks he listened to while writing the description in his
office at the University of Tennessee.
The rediscovery of Darwin’s long-lost beetle
was a remarkable stroke of fortune, but the wider story – of a new species
being found in a museum collection – is surprisingly common. More than 1000 new
beetle species are described each year from the Natural History Museum’s
collection alone.
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