Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Richard Fortey
on the human scale. The epithet magellanica is a reference to the occurrence of the shrub as far south as the Straits of Magellan rather than a direct reference to the great explorer. However, as with Fuchs, it is quite common to name a plant or animal genus or species after somebody, often to honour his or her contribution to the field of study. I have done it myself for people who have collected specimens and then presented them to the Museum collections, or for professors who deserve recognition for all their hard work. It confers a modest piece of immortality. In the case of a species one needs to add a genitive suffix – as in Fuchsia johnsmithi – to show that this is John Smith’s species of Fuchsia. There are a few named forteyi species of fossil, all of them remarkably handsome examples of their kind. I should add that it is not regarded as good form to name a species after oneself; somebody else has to do it; modesty forbids after all. Nor is it permitted to cause offence by naming a creature johnsmithi after John Smith while stating that it is the most unattractive member of the genus. I have to say that Linnaeus himself did not follow this prescription, and named a useless weed Siegesbeckia after one of his enemies.
Humour is a delicate matter in nomenclature. The clam genus Abra is crying out to be married with the species name cadabra; and so it was in a species named by Eames and Wilkins in 1957: Abra cadabra, a very satisfactory touch of humour. However, a subsequent authority decided that the species cadabra did not, after all, belong in Abra – so it was moved to another genus, Theora, and there is nothing very entertaining about Theora cadabra. This kind of decision happens all the time in systematic work, as a subsequent author concludes from careful study that a given species is better included in a genus different from the one to which it was originally assigned. Effectively, this moves the species from one drawer in the collections to another. Old views are dropped and new combinations of names have to be learned; this process is known as revision.
The generously endowed fossil ostracode Colymbosathon ecplecticos causes a sensation in the Sun.
Fossil ostracode Colymbosathon ecplecticos. Photo © David Siveter. Article © The Sun.
Almost as good a pun as the Abra example is one of the numerous carabid beetles I mentioned above – Agra phobia. But my favourite remains the plant bugs described by one G. W. Kirkaldy in 1904. These genera all had the Greek suffix -chisme, pronounced ‘kiss me’. Kirkaldy managed to celebrate all the female objects of his affection by adding the appropriate prefix: Polychisme, Marichisme, Dollichisme and so on (there were rather a lot of them, apparently). Sexual innuendo is evidently irresistible to some taxonomists. It can be more blatant. Professor David Siveter of Leicester University is an expert on small crustaceans called ostracodes. In 2003 he and his colleagues published a paper on a magnificently preserved new fossil genus and species from the Silurian of England, which were some 425 million years old, under the resounding name Colymbosathon ecplecticos. If I might be forgiven for returning to the territory of ‘Biggus Dickus’, the remarkable fact about this ostracode was the size of its fossilized penis: if we translate the Greek, this Silurian species is ‘swimmer with astoundingly large penis’. Oddly enough, this attracted the attention of the press in a way that few new species have ever done. The Sun, always the leader in tastefulness, featured the story under the banner headline ‘OLD TODGER’; the Guardian was hardly less brazen with ‘Well hung geologist’. I doubt whether Science, the distinguished magazine that published the original article, has previously been featured in the pages of the Sun.
To the scientific name is added the namer: Abra cadabra Eames and Wilkins, 1957, or Colymbosathon ecplecticos Siveter et al. 2003. This is so that readers will know who first described the organism concerned, and when. It is remarkable how many plants familiar to Europeans were named first by Linnaeus – certainly almost all the common flowering plants. Botanists like their authors to be abbreviated, and Linnaeus is abbreviated to a bald ‘L.’ – hence, bloody cranesbill is Geranium sanguineum L. The works of Linnaeus are taken as the starting point for all modern scientific names, and everything published earlier is arbitrarily neglected. The beginning of modern nomenclature for plants is his Species Plantarum of 1753, and for animals the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, 1758. Fungi are different, since Linnaeus did not have much to say about them. The greatest early mycological figure, the ‘Linnaeus of mushrooms’, was another Swede called Elias Fries, who seemed to have an almost uncanny memory for these most fleeting ‘vegetable productions of nature’; in fact, modern molecular studies have shown that fungi are not really vegetables at all. His great work published between 1821 and 1832 is a conscious homage to Linnaeus, the Systema Mycologicum, and hence mushroom names go back to 1821, although Fries is said to ‘validate’ certain still earlier names, such as that for the familiar fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, the archetypal red mushroom with white ‘spots’, which Linnaeus had already included in his remit. Quite why Sweden, and in particular the University of Uppsala, should have had such a grip of the system of nature is an interesting question. I went to see Linnaeus’ farmhouse outside Uppsala at Hammarby to find out if it offered any clues. It is a simple wooden building, now painted maroon, with neat white square windows, no different from a hundred others in the more agricultural part of Sweden – sensible, four square and with a proper feeling for place. Maybe the clue was in the very modesty of the structure; nothing showy, just a monument to hard and consistent work – farmers’ virtues, Swedish virtues, Lutheran seriousness.
So far I have said rather a lot about names, but not much about science. The real business of taxonomy is to look closely at the animal or plant in question to assess its features, the business of identification. Only then can you identify a new and unnamed species, or establish whether a previous observer was mistaken about its systematic position. There is no way of generalizing this process, since every different kind of animal or plant is a distinct proposition. If you are ‘spider man’ you don’t climb up walls to save the world as we know it, but you do know a tremendous amount about spider genitalia, because that is the best feature by which to recognize a species. The fern woman will look at the spore capsules on the back of the fronds, and appreciate subtle difference in the way the fronds are subdivided. Flowers and leaves will be the traditional bailiwick of the botanist; spores and microscopic cellular structures on the gill edge will be the province of the fungus man. A crustacean expert will peruse the finest details of the legs and the antennae of his object of study. A mollusc specialist might appraise the colour and ornament of a marine snail, while a lepidopterist will be as familiar with the speckles and dappling of a butterfly wing as he would be with the faces of his own family. One lepidopterist I knew was actually rather more aware of the former than he was of the latter. An ornithologist might listen to songs, spotting their individuality at species or racial level, but then so will an expert on cicadas or bats. Many specialists will take themselves off to the electron microscope, which will afford crisp photographs of the tiniest of organs or ornament on the smallest of animals: bryozoans (‘sea mats’) stand revealed as decorators as virtuosic as Islamic ceramicists; a tiny mite encrusted with horns and growths as Gothic as an extra in a Dracula movie; the cells of a parasite beautifully embroidered with the equipment they need to carry out their depredations; the teeth – radula – of a mollusc as distinctive as a rack of stalagmites. The palaeontologist will have fewer details at his disposal, and so will be obliged to read as much as he can from the testimony of bones or shells – the wonderfully symmetric test of a sea urchin, the calcite exoskeleton of a trilobite, the tiny pollen grains of a plant that has long vanished from the earth.
The next stage is the library. Although memory is important in identifying specimens, sooner or later it must be checked against the printed record. This is the point where the scientist takes himself or herself off to the journals and monographs, wherein will be found descriptions and synopses of species related to the one under the microscope. The appropriate number of the journal will be found in a catalogue, nowadays on a computer, and then the hunt around the miles of shelves will begin. If a new species is to be named it is important to