Whole-animal specimen collection: yes or no?

For centuries, Western naturalists and scientists collected animal species mainly by shooting or other lethal means. And they did it thoughtlessly: museums received hundreds of the same species. Live animals were prized for menageries, but were harder to collect and hard to ship home in good condition, especially in the days of sail. Others collected for the cabinets of curiosities for the wealthy, or simply for anything they could sell.

Sometimes even the scientists were foolish, in that they didn't think enough about the impact of such collection  on the populations of rare species.  Some of this was ignorance, but it should be obvious that, if it's harder and harder to find specimens, there are fewer to find, and maybe collecting more is not a good idea. We do not, as far as I can find out from books and discussions, have a case where a species was driven to extinction solely by scientific collecting, 

One factor in old-style scientific collecting was that it was hard to share specimens at a distance. Shipping them back and forth was chancy, travel was time-consuming, and so on. Illustrations (although many were gorgeous and detailed, and an art form unto themselves) could only fill part of that gap. Before the 20th century, societies for scientific discussion, usually centered around universities and museums, met mostly locally, although transportation improvements continuously improved that situation as railroads and steamships became more common.  Another challenge was that, without databases, online discussions, and especially the science and tools of DNA analysis and gene sequencing, there was limited information to derive from feathers, scales, and other castoff or partial specimens that could be collected without harming animals.  

Allison Q. Byrne, in this article in PLOS Biology, set off a major round of discussion (as she hoped to)  by arguing museums and other institutions should stop collecting whole animals. Not only did modern communications, photography and 3D modeling,  and analysis techniques mean we could gather more information from fragmentary specimens, but there was harmful mindset behind whole-animal collecting, "Removing an animal from its natural habitat and killing it for the purpose of storing it in a museum collection reinforces the stance that humans have dominion over other living creatures."  "...compassionate collection recognizes the importance of the emotional connection that links human and nonhuman lives..." students on a collecting trip would be excited to see a new specimen but realize "...because they found this creature, it will not live to see another day."

Michael W. Nachman, Elizabeth J. Beckman, Carla Cicero, Chris J. Conroy, Robert Dudley, Tyrone B. Hayes, et. al., (and by et. al. I mean 120 other scientists) just published this response in the same journal. While agreeing specimen collecting should be cautiously done and endorsing other aspects of Byrne's "compassionate collection," they argue she overstated what could be done without whole animals."  "...verification of these species requires intensive anatomical analyses that are impossible without whole-organism voucher specimens." They added, "...understanding evolutionary processes often involves the study of large series of voucher specimens that document geographic, temporal, age, or sexual variation in specific traits." DNA and small castoff items like feathers don't allow us to fully study parasites or diseases. They don't allow us to track evolutionary processes. 

Byrne responded with this piece arguing the response ignored the "beating heart" of her original essay: her focus on ethics. She argued some of the points about the need for lethal collections, noting for example, "Skin swabs taken from live animals provide for more accurate pathogen detection than those taken after formalin-fixation." It's a short response, though, and she does not engage that in depth.  She  encourages all scientists involved to think about their ethics and adherence to the status quo.

While I appreciate Byrne's points about our relation to animals, I think Nachman and company are right. Anatomical studies, especially, can only be done with specimens. Modern DNA studies and genome sequencing were developed on collected specimens. Using only the results of those studies means resulting analysis is only completely valid for that animal at a point in time. Collecting should be done only when needed, and as painlessly as possible, but it is necessary.

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

Book Review: A Solid Introduction to Lakes

Lakes: Their Birth, Life, and Death  

by John Richard Saylor 

Timber Press, 2022, 240pp.

As someone whose fiction and nonfiction both often concern lake ecosystems and the life they support, I was looking for a primer to help me dig into the basic science. Saylor does not disappoint.  

Here I learned the ways lakes form, the ways they exchange oxygen and CO2, and the life and death of lakes themselves, something I'd never really thought about.  Another topic I knew little about is the controversy over how some lakes, the most famous being the Carolina Bays, formed and obtained their symmetrical shapes. (Saylor says correctly that extraterrestrial impact would have to be improbably precise, but he doesn't 100% rule it out, and none of the other theories works well.) He explores ice, glaciers, subglacial lakes, salt lakes, surface tension, overturning (the layers of water flip, oxygenating the depths) and many other topics. He also discusses ecology and the damage humans and their side effects, like agricultural runoff, are doing to so many of these vital bodies of water. The prose is readable although dry in spots, and I only had to reread to get the mechanisms or facts he was describing at two points. 

 I had some quibbles that held back a fifth star. Saylor doesn't treat the life within lakes - why which lakes have which types of plants and animals, the food chain, and how all lake life interacts - in as much (there's no way to avoid the word) depth as I hoped. And the book needs more illustrations. At one point he describes where factors fall on a graph without even showing the graph or offering examples of lakes the reader might be familiar with. The (here we go again) bottom line, though, is that I came away much better informed than I had been, so on balance Saylor definitely achieved his main goal. This is a reference everyone who enjoys the bounty of lakes, wonders about them, or writes about them should definitely have on the shelf. 

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

Dunking on "Life on Our Planet"

As a paleonerd in general and a Dunkleosteus fan in particular, I think Life on Our Planet is a spectacular creation that could have been created better. 

The Dunk sequence is given appropriate prominence.  Good.  The CGI is decent, and the problematical tail and dorsal fin are up to current thinking. The filmmakers did a fair job of using the third dimension: some animated underwater sequences in documentaries are confined mainly to one plane or orientation.  Also, the animators get points for not merely re-imaging the juveniles and adults – at least, the scars/digs/scratches are different. It was filmed before the recent publications about Dunkleosteus size and proportions, so the filmmakers didn't need to pick a side.  

After that, though – what the hell?

First, the Dunk just appears, with no word of the evolution leading up to it or the larger groups it nests within. I never heard the word “placoderm.” This is a problem that reoccurs throughout this series, but it bugs me especially here.  From the narration, you'd think this is the first fish with jaws.  Really bad.

Most bizarrely, why are the juveniles following an adult? I’ve never read any suggestion that this happened.  IIRC, it would be utterly unknown behavior for fish. These aren't ducklings: they're independent juveniles that would swim like hell away from an adult that might use those jaws to make sushi out of them. For that matter, why are they even near each other? I see nothing in the literature about schooling behavior for Dunks.  

Most disappointingly, the armor appears to be uncovered bone in direct contact with the water. You can see the scrapes – not healed or scarred over, as they would be with flesh, but simply dug in.  This is very outmoded thinking. Also, the juveniles weirdly have just as many scrapes as the adults. Do they get in all their serious fights as teenagers and then switch to safe prey? Not hardly.  Finally, I don't like the "wrists" on the fins.  This isn't a plesiosaur. Look at Coccosteus, of which we know the outline, or any shark. There's a little room for debate on the exact appearance   but I'm pretty sure this version is wrong. [Yes, I know I usually object to using the 1-m Coccosteus as a model for the ~8m Dunkleosteus, but like everyone else, I can be flexible when it supports my point,]

The series has problems beyond Dunkleosteus.  Dinosaur experts have shredded the design of animals like T. rex, noting the filmmakers used obsolete ideas or copied (if not repurposing actual animation) from sources like Jurassic Park, maximizing the scariness of the animals as opposed to the more lifelike creations in Prehistoric Planet (PP).  There’s no excuse for that given the budget the program had and the resources of its parent company.  One point often made online is that no effort seems to have been made to even look at the work of top paleoartists who’ve spent years evolving their work along with the science.

The structure is odd – why are we in the “Age of Dinosaurs” (as voiced by the always-superb Morgan Freeman) watching modern ants fight? I like the sliding time scale, but surely some branching images showing how evolution is getting us from one featured animal to the next are in order.

Why do the trilobites make amplified, very clear clicking noises when they walk given that they and presumably we observers are supposedly underwater?  That the water is swimming-pool clear is an understandable artistic choice, but it's not a good one: it's another thing that distances us from the idea we're watching real animals. Water is done much better in the Dunkleosteus sequence, at least when we draw back and see through longer distances.  

I said the CGI was pretty good with the Dunk, although it’s not on the level of realism we see with aquatic species in PP (which I hope will someday venture to the Devonian). The overall quality varies, though. I saw a comment on X that the anomalocarid doesn’t look at all like a live animal, just a sophisticated cartoon.  I went back to look, and… yeah. 

I was mostly entertained, occasionally enthralled and sometimes disappointed. Simply put, this series isn’t the best it could be, or should have been.  

Screen grabs: Fair Use claimed for program review. 

Dunk with offspring: Dunk head emphasizing damage to bone armor: Anamalocaris:

Visit: www.mattbille.com

Dunkleosteus terrelli page: https://www.facebook.com/DunkleosteusTerrelli/

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

Newly Acquired Dunkleosteus Fossils!

I have two new Dunkleosteus fossils in my personal collection. It's immensely satisfying, and I thought the journey involved would be of interest to readers. 

First, the fossils. I now have a 5-cm maxillary fang tip, with the very tip broken off but still lethal after 380MY, and a lovely, professionally prepped posterior dorsolateral bone.

Photos Yinan Wang, 2023

As a science writer who’s done one article on the species (Prehistoric Times, Summer 2018) and created the Dunkleosteus terrelli Facebook page,  I of course have always wanted to own a piece of the real thing,  

 (BONUS: my posted interview with Engelman on the latest Dunk theories) 

 got three Dunk fossil pieces, two bits of armor and a chunk of supraorbital bone, off eBay about 2014. They’d come from an Ohio garage sale. There were faded specimen numbers on their plastic bags. I sent photos and numbers to “Dunk Central,” the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, asking if they were anything important and saying I’d donate them if they were. They were not.  I’m guessing they were collected on some dig, judged unnecessary, and someone was allowed to take them home. Maybe they were given to a volunteer. In any event, I felt ok keeping them after learning they had no scientific value. 

One of my older Dunk fossils with skull in Denver Museum of Nature and Science. 

I wanted some pieces from other areas of the skull: not as a part of a study approach, but to feel like I had a more complete connection to the animal.  I was working hard on a Dunk novel that would take the standard rediscovered-predator thriller premise and elevate it with a focus on human drama vs. blood, and one backed by thorough and accurate research.  This became Apex Predator, which I’ve been shopping in current form for several years now.  I often took bone bits to meetings with agents. 

After the quick eBay find,  I assumed it would be fairly easy to find more. Instead, I learned that even the major fossil houses rarely offer anything, and when they do it’s beyond what a middle-class science writer can pay out.  I’d love a $3,500 jawbone, but if I showed my wife the bill, you can guess what the next extinct species would be. There are also many reports of fake Dunkleosteus fossils, and some beautiful fossils from places like some areas of Morocco are tainted by reports of dubiously legal collecting,  

I didn’t obsess over it, but I kept an eye out. I posted on Facebook and other social media that I was looking. I kept checking online fossils sales merchants, and contacted the ones that didn’t detail their wares online. I created an eBay alert. I asked paleontologists and writers.  I asked dealers at fossil shows that came through Denver. (It was at one of these a dealer claimed he’d seen an impression fossil of a small juvenile Dunk but had not been able to afford it.  I’ve never found anyone else who recalls seeing such a thing, so I assume it must have been a fake or a misidentification of a smaller placoderm.)

It was the personal contact approach that paid off after almost a decade. I’d chatted on X with Yinan Wang, “The Fossil Locator,”  author of books on state fossils and so on.  I was asking him to take a glance at the current Apex Predator draft, which he offered to do.  I mentioned in passing that I was looking for more fossils. It turned out he was, in fact, willing to part with two items from his own collection.

He wrote, "They're both from the Cleveland Shale and collected around the Cleveland region. I don't know the name of the collector but they were in an estate auction back in 2018. Gray Estates LLC." So the exact trail is unknown, but Wang owned them legally.

So I have them now. And I do feel more connected as I run my hands over them.  Fossils are the closest thing we can get to time traveling. They take us back. 

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

New species of wild cat described!

 All new mammals are noteworthy, and we generally love cats, so a new cat is news is the way a new newt is not news, or at least not notable news. And we have a new cat.

Small wild cats have flourished in South América. The genus Leopardus groups eight species (most common popular names: ocelot, pampas cat,  and margay) marked by a variety of colors and spot patterns and a predilection for cute little rounded ears. They're genetically distinct from other cats, with 36 chromosomes instead of the standard 38.  

Best known of the Leopardus species, the ocelot L. pardalus). The species is about twice the size of a house cat.  (Photo in public domain)

Now a presumed ocelot skin collected in Columbia in 1989 has proven to be something else. Manuel Ruiz-García spotted the striking reddish skin in the  Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute in 2001. He was immediately certain it was a new species, but species, especially of high-profile groups like wild cats, can't just be named because they look different. (In theory, the rules are universally applicable, but does anyone look hard when you publish on a new species of amoeba?)  There are differing opinions about the number and distinctiveness of several Leopardus species to begin with, and Ruiz-Garcia had to be thorough.  The episode thus illustrates the painstaking process involved and the dedication required of scientists seeking to establish a new species. It took him 22 years to accomplish the analysis needed to separate the new cat both morphologically and genetically and then publish his paper.  

L: Ruiz-Garcia's designated holotype of the new species. R: comparison skin of the most visually similar cat, the tigrina or oncilla (L. tigrinus).   (Fair use claimed for photo by Manual Ruiz-García - https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/14/6/1266# https://www.javeriana.edu.co/pesquisa/gato-de-narino-nueva-especie-felino/)

While I know only the very basics of genetics, I think this text from the Abstract offers a useful idea of the complexity involved.

"Analysis of the complete mitochondrial genomes from 44 felid specimens (including 18 L. tigrinus and all the current known species of the genus Leopardus), the mtND5 gene from 84 felid specimens (including 30 L. tigrinus and all the species of the genus Leopardus), and six nuclear DNA microsatellites (113 felid specimens of all the current known species of the genus Leopardus) indicate that this specimen does not belong to any previously recognized Leopardus taxon."

So we have a new cat.  At least, we hope we do. There is still just the one specimen.  The cat is, at best, extremely rare. It is, at worst, extinct.  Let us hope that adage about nine lives has some scientific significance this time.

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!