Kurt Auffenberg astutely writes:
"Out collecting Viviparus yesterday. Sorry to hear all this, but it is all
too familiar. Way too familiar! A agree that we should use specimens we
collect ourselves, but as you know this is not always possible. We must
retain some degree of trust in older material. I must say that Harry Lee
brought up a good point a few months ago over the phone. He said that the
study of taxonomy does not just include the specimens, but a clear
understanding of the collectors and authors of the time, their methods, the
quality of the optics in their microscopes . . a whole bunch of stuff to
deduce what was meant in a description or discussion. So just because a
label doesn't match . . . the old stuff may be able to be teased into the
proper perspective with appropriate historical knowledge. One of my
earlier points comes to mind now. When faced with vast amounts of material
and deadlines this luxury may fall by the wayside."
True it is. Of course I overspoke in my last message, e-xaggerating by
e-mail. Kurt's point about deadlines is all too well known to me, and to
every other researcher these days. Gone are the days (if they ever truly
existed) when one could spend as much time as one liked on a project. When
one is being paid to do a task, then it must be finished on time. Darwin
and other gentleman scientists were exceptions, but they were independently
wealthy. No one ever grew rich on a curator's salary!
Harry Lee's comments are very much to the point to the discussion on
"jumping fossils." Early in my career at the Survey, I discarded several
boxes of limestone samples, because no one could decipher the field numbers
written on the rocks, and they took up a lot of space. Did I ever feel
stupid when the field notes turned up a couple of years later!
It could have been a lot worse. In the 19th century, Beecher discovered a
thin seam of black shale, just an inch thick, that contained abundant
specimens of trilobites with the legs preserved. Trilobites are fairly
common in the rock record, but trilobites with preserved appendages have
only been found at three sites in the world: one Cambrian, one Ordovician,
and one Devonian. Beecher prepared many of them, and mined out as much of
the shale seam as he could, setting it aside in barrels. A later curator,
failing to understand the significance of these barrels full of shale,
discarded them. They could have been traded, as is, for many wonderful
specimens; or they could have been sold for thousands of dollars. But when,
a century later, doctoral student Cisne looked for them, they were not
there.
One lesson from my limestone fiasco is that a new curator's first business
is to learn all he or she can about the context of the collection: its
history, the biographies of the most important collectors, their archived
field notes and correspondence and photographs, current addresses and phone
numbers of living collectors, articles written about items from the
collection, tools and chemicals used in collecting and preparing specimens,
suppliers for tools and cabinets and trays, and many other items. And the
curator should try to re-visit the major collecting sites to cast a modern
eye on classic exposures. In most museums, this information is not to be
obtained in any one place, or from any one person. Librarians can be
invaluable, and you can learn a lot from them at lunch or over beer as well
as on the job. True, archives can be a great time sink, especially if they
are disorganized; but it can be worth the trouble when a letter turns up
saying, "Do you remember that little creek just north of Jackson? I found
the most remarkable mollusk there the other day..." and it turns out to
illuminate the origin of a unique specimen.
Obviously, a curator can't throw himself into history for the first year of
his stay at a museum. But he can often do part of this necessary work as
part of the library research needed for each new project. For example, my
first project was on Cretaceous invertebrates. So, while I looked up
articles on this subject, I also looked up material on previous collectors
of Cretaceous invertebrates. Later, I worked on Mississippian material, and
again took the opportunity to dig some more into the archives. You might
call this the "spiral method" of learning, because each new discovery sheds
light on previous finds. After nine years, there are still boxes of letters
written to and from the previous curators that no one has read in decades,
and I look forward to exploring more of this trove.
Another lesson from my limestone fiasco is that archives must be well
organized in order to be useful. If material can't be found on demand, then
it might as well not exist. Curators are not archivists, and they should
not be expected to do this work in addition to their own, but they can make
it clear to their librarians and supervisors that archival work is valued.
A final lesson is this: I no longer deaccession ANYTHING unless (a) the
material has NO labels and (b) I have paraded everyone who might be
connected with it past the material and asked them to remember information
about it. In this way, I can correct the casual methods of the past (while
enforcing more stringent documentation today, now that I'm in charge).
After all this, you might wonder why we bother with poorly labeled older
material. Well... A person who normally doesn't collect fossils, and who
doesn't know the proper labeling procedure, will still collect a
spectacular specimen, so some of our showy pieces have poor data. And most
exposures are temporary in this humid climate. Many well-preserved
specimens come from places that cannot be visited today because the
roadcuts have been covered with grass or pines, or because the river bluffs
are drowned beneath manmade lakes. In Florida and Louisiana, where any hole
dug in the ground quickly fills with water, this is even more the case. If
you want to get an idea of the geographic and stratigraphic range and
variation of a species, the way to do it is to use museum collections as
well as to collect from sites that are currently exposed.
Andrew K. Rindsberg
Curator, Paleontological Collection
Geological Survey of Alabama
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