Thenew species that are collected by scientists take more than twenty years on average to be described, time they usually spend on museum shelves, as pointed out by a study published this week in the magazineCurrent Biology. Researchers have called this period“shelf life”, and the fact that this is so long is due to several reasons. The main one, according to one of the authors, Benoît Fontaine, from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, explains to the SINC agency, is thatsometimes “they are rare species from which a single specimen is obtained, and taxonomists have to wait for more specimens before describing the species. “Fontaine further notes that reducing the length of” shelf lives “would require methodological advances in species description and would require training more taxonomists. ?
The long periods that these species go unidentified as wellcan cause the species in question to become extinct before the scientific communityknow of its existence, and that the identification is post-extinction. Hence the need to become aware “of the importance of taxonomy, that is, the description of unknown biodiversity,” says Fontaine, adding that it is “an urgent matter, since it allows us to study, know and enjoy that biodiversity” .
The work was based on a sample of 600 species described in 2007, and the data revealed that these species had a mean “shelf life” of 20.7 years. Plants and fish were the groups in which the longest period was observed, above 30 years.
The species that appears in the study with the longest “shelf life” period is Tropidolaemus laticinctus, an Indonesian viper with a complex taxonomic history, whose identification was based on five specimens, one of which was collected in 1801. Other cases of long “shelf lives” include a bat described from an individual collected in 1856 and donated to a museum in Philadelphia, a beetle from the Italian Alps obtained in 1912, or a mite discovered among the feathers of cockatoos collected in Papua New Guinea in 1900.
