The tiny, lungless Thorius salamander from southern Mexico, thinner
than a match and smaller than a quarter. The lushly white-coated
Saki, an arboreal monkey from the Brazilian rainforests. The
olinguito, a native of the Andes, which looks part mongoose, part
teddy bear. These fantastic species are all new to science--at
least newly named and identified; but they weren't discovered in
the wild, instead, they were unearthed in the drawers and cavernous
basements of natural history museums. As Christopher Kemp reveals
in The Lost Species, hiding in the cabinets and storage units of
natural history museums is a treasure trove of discovery waiting to
happen. With Kemp as our guide, we go spelunking into museum
basements, dig through specimen trays, and inspect the drawers and
jars of collections, scientific detectives on the hunt for new
species. We discover king crabs from 1906, unidentified tarantulas,
mislabeled Himalayan landsnails, an unknown rove beetle originally
collected by Darwin, and an overlooked squeaker frog, among other
curiosities. In each case, these specimens sat quietly for
decades--sometimes longer than a century--within the collections of
museums, before sharp-eyed scientists understood they were new.
Each year, scientists continue to encounter new species in museum
collections--a stark reminder that we have named only a fraction of
the world's biodiversity. Sadly, some specimens have waited so long
to be named that they are gone from the wild before they were
identified, victims of climate change and habitat loss. As Kemp
shows, these stories showcase the enduring importance of these very
collections. The Lost Species vividly tells these stories of
discovery--from the latest information on each creature to the
people who collected them and the scientists who finally realized
what they had unearthed--and will inspire many a museumgoer to want
to peek behind the closed doors and rummage through the archives.
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