The Lost Species: Great Expeditions in the Collections of Natural History Museums

Scalability is one of the largest concerns facing our modern digital society. Whether we're looking at social media with its onslaught of "shares" (over 9,000 pictures per second on Snapchat!) or the sequencing of human and other genomes, it's clear our data-driven society is generating more information than we can process."The Lost Species" explores this phenomenon of scalability from a refreshingly analog perspective. While I suspect this was not the author's intent, the stories he tells of discovery-within-discovery give me hope. We can be a species who collects knowledge for no reason other than that knowledge is important, and we can be a species who looks back at previously-gained knowledge and grows from its analysis.I am a wannabe scientist. "The Lost Species" is delivered in a strong scientific voice, while also inviting readers like me along with its story-like qualities. It makes me wonder what might be buried within my own museum!

This is an excellent book emphasizing the importance of museum collections today. As an entomology student in the mid-60s, I learned that taxonomy and systematics were faintly old-fashioned disciplines of scant relevance to the modern world pursued in dusty museums by tweedy retired professors with leather patches on their elbows and eccentric maiden ladies of means. Not so. The recent emphasis on biodiversity has revived them. As the book repeatedly emphasizes, you cannot save what you don’t know exists. With only 2 million of an estimated 10 million species named (some estimates are as high as 30 million existing species) and perhaps half of all specimens in museums and biorepositories misidentified, there is a lot of work to do. Far from being wastes of space, large museum collections are vital to learning what exists now and what existed in the past. Many new species are described from material that was collected years ago and has been stored in museums, unexamined or misidentified, for over a century. Many newly described species are now extinct in the places they were first collected or entirely extinct in the world. To save the rest, we need to know what they are. This book is a powerful argument for the importance of taxonomy today. Through examples of species rediscovered in museum collections, the author makes an important case for continuing study of the diversity of life.

Early in this fascinating book, Kemp writes that “Taxonomists and biologists describe about eighteen thousand new species each year.” He mentions later that over 1,000 species were named from New Guinea in a decade.Many of these (most, for some orders) are discovered in museum collections, not in the field. As Kemp shows, those aren’t just obscure frogs or small invertebrates. Stories of museum discoveries (some supplemented by fieldwork once the specimens were uncovered), include all types. For mammals, we have the impossibly cute olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina), a raccoon relative from Columbia and Ecuador), the little black tapir, the Arfak pygmy bandicoot, frogs, turtles, tarantulas, and more. It gets crazy when we get to the beetles: collections in American institutions alone include approximately one billion specimens, with thousands of species yet to be described.Kemp opens this superb book with an explanation of why fleshing out the taxonomy of museum specimens is so important. Whether a frog lives on both sides of a river or the frogs on the other side have developed into a new species provides a great deal of information on speciation, the environment, and the right steps for conservation biology to take.There is a trading network humming all the time between institutions, where photos, 3D images, CAT scans, specimens themselves, and facts and opinions about them go back and forth.This is arduous work. Many specimens, especially older ones, may have been mislabeled in the field, or mislabeled when they arrive, or simply left to look at later: decades or centuries may lapse. The care and inventory of collections is underfunded and some specimens are literally piled up, Biologist Laura Marsh, studying saki monkey specimens in a Munich musem,was pointed to a pile of monkey skins six feet high and told to look through it.Then there’s expertise. In particular, there are not nearly enough people who can differentiate insects.Kemp devotes one chapter to fossils (countless dinosaur bones are still in their plaster jackets, and no one knows if they’re labeled correctly, when they are labeled at all). Another chapter shows us it’s not always the specimen itself that is the discovery. A shell collected in Indonesia around 1894 was next examined in 2007 by a scientist who found an artificial pattern of scratches on it: it is 500,000 years old and the oldest example of pre-H.sapiens art. The patterns of collection matter, too. Collections can identify what the historic range of a species was and how it’s changed. Species most affected by climate change can indicate when conditions in their habitat changed. Finally, patterns can tell us of extinctions.This is an important, unique, and accessible book: Kemp’s writing and his explanations are good enough that even causally interested readers don't have to stop and look up a term. There are thorough endnotes. I was puzzled by the absence in his examples of the famous giant gecko (Hoplodactylus delcourti) discovery, and I wanted many more illustrations. Overall, though, I loved this book.

There is so much that we don't know that we don't know! This book by Christopher Kemp takes us around the world, back in time, and back to present day. Intriguing stories of lost and found and the importance of knowing the detail. A great read!

Great read. Both informative and entertaining from cover to cover. Five stars

Auf der Erde exisitiert eine ungeahnte Vilefalt an Organismen. Rund 1,5 Millionen kennen wir schon, aber wietere 5, 10 30 oder 100 Millionen warten noch auf ihre Entdeckung. Die naturkundlichen Sammlungen der großen Forschungsmuseen sind für den Prozess der Entdeckung noch unbekannter Arten unabdingbar, da Belegexemplare der schon beschriebenen udn entdeckten Arten und Umweltbelege dort verfahrt werden. Mehr noch, ein erheblicher Teil der noch unentdeckten Diversität ist bereits in den Sammlungen vorhanden und wartet dort auf seine Entdeckung. Was liegt es näher, also sich schon einmal mit den bereits verfügbaren Objekten zu beschäftigen? Christopher Kemp, Naturkundler und Museumsmann, hat zahlreiche Beispiele zusammengetragen, bei denen genau das passiert ist. Er berichtet unterhaltsam und genau, wie die Entdeckung neuer Arten zwischen Forschungssammlungen und Feldarbeit funktioniert und zu welchen faszinierenden Ergebnissen sie kommt. Zugleich ist Kemps Buch auch ein intimer Blick in das Wesen der Artenetdecker selber, ion ihre Begeisterung, ihr Wissen und ihr Vorgehen. Seine Beispiele entstammen alle der jüngeren Zeit und sind mit Biografien und persönlichen Interviews mit den Akteuren verknüpft. Das Buch besteht aus zahlreichen Einzelkapiteln, die erzählerisch nicht verbunden sind, auch wenn sie alle sehr geeignete Beispiele für solche Entdeckungen darstellen. Durch die relativ kurzen, anekdotischen Kapitel lässt sich das unterhaltsame Buch wunderbar lesen. Ihc kann es nur von ganzem Herzen empfehlen, und zwar jedem, der sich für die naturkundliche Vielfalt auf unserem Planeten interessiert.