>I think the most frequent cause of type loss is neglect....usually
>attributable to the loss and non-replacement of museum curatorial
>staff.  Fot instance, when the University of Alabama's collection found
>it's new home in Florida, we had a lot of work to do.....during that 5-6
>years we located T. H. Aldrich's recent type specimens and several of
>Maxwell Smith's, both marine and terrestrial.  Some of these were marked
>as types, some were not.

Some of Aldrich's types got left behind, overlooked at Alabama.

I know of one type specimen that was lost in the mail, but it was
unidentifiable to begin with and had a dubious type locality and thus
was not a great loss.

----------------------------------------
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama, Box 870345
Tuscaloosa AL 35487
"James gave the huffle of a snail in
danger But no one heard him at all"  A.
A. Milne

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