A nineteenth-century Ohioan named a new species of trace fossil based on a
specimen embedded in a slab of limestone by a street in Cincinnati. When
Charles Osgood revisited the "type sidewalk" in the 1960s, he found that it
had been paved over with concrete. Similarly, the type specimen of the type
species of Capodistria, another trace fossil, was embedded in a castle wall
near Trieste. But the discoverer of Arthrophycus, who found it in a slab of
rock set as a decoration in front of a Pennsylvania tavern, bought the
specimen and took it back to Philadelphia with him. Only later was it lost.
The type species of Psilonichnus is virtually uncollectable: It's a Y-shaped
burrow a few meters deep, beautifully exposed on a seacliff on San Salvador
in the Bahamas.

Sometimes the type was rescued. For several decades, vertebrate
paleontologists patiently watched a rare skeleton embedded in one of the
dressed stones making up a railroad bridge in New England. When the bridge
was taken down, the paleontologists arranged to retrieve the block.

To the list of disasters, add earthquakes. Natural history specimens took a
big hit in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, although most of them
probably would have survived if the museum had not burned following the
quake. The museum staff had time to save some of the collections by handing
them through a window. One supposes that the lightest specimens survived
best...

Rafinesque named so many species, including mollusks, based on his own
collections that he rates as a disaster in a category of his own. His
European collections were destroyed in a shipwreck on the way to America. He
made no arrangements for the proper disposal of his American collections and
they were unsympathetically auctioned off to the public at his death. Most
of the specimens were lost to science and probably no longer exist.

Albert Koch's fossil bones were also shipwrecked, but the Key West salvagers
realized that they were important and sent them on to their destination.

The famous author Nabokov made three large collections of butterflies during
his lifetime. The first two were abandoned and presumably lost as he fled
the Russian Revolution, first to the Crimea and then to the West. But he
never gave up.

Dick Petit mentions the use of figures as types. He's right that customs and
rules have changed over the years. At present, if I understand it right, the
illustration is presumed to be of a real specimen unless proved otherwise,
and that is the type specimen. But some of T. A. Conrad's illustrations are
reconstructions based on several specimens, so there never was a specimen
exactly like his drawing. Someone may have later come by and labeled one of
Conrad's specimens as the type, in handwriting that may or may not
correspond to what a published paper says and may not even be one of
Conrad's specimens after all. And some of Conrad's specimens are missing;
fossils can be fragile. As Dick says, the solutions to such taxonomic
puzzles can be complex. I suppose the point is to make sure we're all
communicating knowledge about the same species. Still, a good taxonomist
examines the specimens as well as the labels!

Andy

Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama


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