Good points, Paul. Sometimes a drawing is the best type specimen. For a long time, methods of preservation were inadequate for most groups of animals, and a drawing could actually last longer than the type specimen. Some animals shrink and distort badly in preservative fluids, and most lose their color. Important skeletal elements may dissolve. Nudibranchs can only be properly appreciated when alive, or in photographs or drawings. T. A. Conrad's methods of diagnosis deserve a mention. I've heard him castigated because of his brevity, but the style at the time was to make diagnoses short and to the point. Linnaeus himself said that a diagnosis should take up no more than 13 words (in Latin; English tends to use more words per thought than Latin). One method of cutting out words was not to repeat generic characters in the diagnosis of a species, which puts the burden on the reader to know the genera well before reading about new species. Conrad's diagnoses are spare, but elegant: He often captured the essence of the taxon as it is understood even now. Some of his contemporaries also produced brief diagnoses, but many are based on unimportant or variable characters, and some are quite meaningless. Here is a typical Conrad diagnosis, of the Eocene gastropod Oliva alabamensis Conrad, 1833: "Shell subfusiform, spire conical, acute, the whorls contracted, and defined by an impressed line above the suture. Length 1-1/2 inches." Breathtakingly brief, isn't it? That is, "Oliva alabamensis is a new species of Oliva whose shell is shaped rather like a spindle (subfusiform), and whose spire is conical. [That is, the shell bellied out as the animal grew older.] The apex is sharply angular (acute). Each whorl covers much of the last one (contracted), with a narrow groove (impressed line) where the whorls touch (suture)." That's a lot to squeeze into one sentence, but the specialized terms help. It's not particularly easy to read, but the fact is that the diagnosis has stood the test of time. The species has been transferred to genus Agaronia, but it is still understood in about the same way. Andrew K. Rindsberg Geological Survey of Alabama