Review: The Lost Species by Christopher Kemp

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

 Christopher Kemp (2017, University of Chicago, 250pp.)

 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, and then you get to the non-mammals like frogs, turtles, tarantulas, etc. It gets crazy when you 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 steps for conservation biology.

In the case of the little black tapir, a student in a Brazilian institution came to her supervising scientist with a tapir skull, telling him this one looked different from its drawer-mates. It was. It was eventually matched to a tapir skull Theodore Roosevelt (who also noticed it was odd) had collected in 1903, and then to research in the wild to study live specimens,  The American Museum of Natural History has 250,000 specimens of just one mammalian order (Chiroptera, the bats) and no one knows how many species that might add to the 1,300 now described. 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 set out to revise the saki monkeys (genus Pithecia) after some peculiar sightings in the field. She went to 36 museums in 17 countries to study 876 skins and 690 skulls. One stop was the Zoologische Staatssammlung in Munich, where a curator pointed to a pile of monkey skins six feet high and told her to look through it - and these included type specimens. (March ended up revising the whole genus, adding five new specimens and reviving three disputed or synonymized ones.)

Then there’s expertise. In particular, there are not nearly enough people who can differentiate insects.  Kemp visits two scientists who had\ve developed, through decades of work, an almost mystical ability to recognize new or different species from thousands of specimens. They can’t really explain how they do it, although one is helping develop a computer program to help automate the process.

 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 first evidence of pre-humans making art.

Kemp makes an important point about indigenous reports. Cultures dependent on hunting know their local animals well, but they don't categorize them the same way a scientist would. Their categorization is based on practicality.  A hunter in Brazil may differentiate two monkeys and give them different names based on the best times and places to hunt them.  It's no matter to him whether they are separate species or differing populations of the same species. Kemp reports that leads to what is, to taxonomists, overcategorization. If our hunter has six names for local monkeys, a visiting scientist may assume he's talking about six species, when he could be talking about one, two, three, or even seven or eight.  .  

A few more tidbits: American zoologist Kristofer Helgen, who found the holotype olinguito skull in a Field Museum collection, was part of the team that named the skywalker gibbon (Hoolock tianxing) in 2017 from a holotype collected by Roy Chapman Andrews in 1913. A paleontologist at the British Geological Society opened an old cabinet in 2011 and found specimens on glass slides never inspected in the 160 years since Charles Darwin collected them. Collections thus hold not only specimens, but much of the history of the biological sciences. Old specimens are often where cryptic species are spotted or confirmed, as when one giraffe species was split into four. 

Kemp closes with another explanation of the importance of preserving and studying these collections in a time when we are losing species rapidly. The patterns of collection (in location and time) 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.

Last note on content: Helgen also says he knows of 50 mammals in collections that haven’t been described yet.

This is an important and accessible book: Kemp’s writing and his explanations are good enough that I never once had 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. 

Finding species by looking at old specimens with labels like “Argentina, 1900” isn’t as exciting as tramping through Queensland looking for reported marsupial tigers, but sometimes it’s where the action is.