Topic
Where museums and biological collections physically hold type specimens, and how that custody governs access for taxonomic work.
Tübingen researchers named Bathynomus tuebingoborikensis, a giant isopod kept unrecognized in their university's paleontology collection since the 1980s. Working from that one dried animal, the team traces the genus to the Miocene Gulf of Mexico more than 15 million years ago.
Reality
Biologists with calipers went through museum drawers to compile some of the first upper size thresholds for the group. None of the environmental variables the team tested predicted which animals got big.
Reality
DNA from more than 100 museum specimens gives conservationists a century-long baseline for a declining British pollinator. The yearly rate of loss it measures is far too slow for a decade of field monitoring to have caught.
Reality
Joseph Pfaller noticed a crab drop off almost the first yellow-bellied sea snake he handled in 2012, and the larvae he collected then waited about a decade in a Florida museum for a crab specialist to ask what they were.
Reality
The Field Museum holotype was mistaken for a tumour when it arrived in 1968. Sent through an X-ray CT scanner rather than cut open, the bones at the tail tip turned out to be about as normal as any viper's.
Reality
A trip to the Natural History Museum's 19th-century Ecuadorian frogs showed the original specimens had been filed against the wrong animal, leaving a loud, common Choco frog with no name of its own until now.
Reality
A Brazilian-led study in npj Biodiversity counts 1,116 mammal species described since 1990 and where their reference specimens ended up. The answer is now a number institutions can be asked about.
Reality