The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Free

requires a clear understanding of biodiversity. Properly documenting the world’s biodiversity needs large museum collections of voucher specimens, yet some nature-lovers recoil from, in particular, museum bird collections, assuming they represent a shameful carnage of birds. In fact, animals killed for museums are usually a drop in the bucket compared to natural attrition. It is estimated that around the world more than a million birds die every day in collisions with cars, and another million are killed by household cats. In the United States alone as many as 100 million birds die each year by flying into windows. Such losses are usually easily made up by birds’ prolific breeding. It has been calculated that the birds currently collected for all North American natural history museums combined are equivalent to the number that would be killed in the same period by just fifteen medium-sized bird-eating hawks. Increasingly, too, many museums get some or all of their new bird specimens by salvage from those killed accidentally.
    When confronted by dozens of study-skins of a common bird on a tray, a person will often ask why so many specimens are needed. The answer lies in the variability of individuals with age, stage of growth, sex, colour-form, season, geographical location, decade, century, and also in random individual ways. A biologist cannot characterise a species by examination of just a few birds: to calculate average measurements and look for tendencies and trends they need representative series of specimens. In this way, natural history collections underpin biology, and support studies of evolution, speciation (the formation of species), biogeography (the distribution of organisms), morphology (the study of shape and form), and conservation.
    Much collection-building by natural history curators is general, rather than directed towards any immediate need. As long as the collections are representative, the curators have faith that such specimens will prove indispensable to future users, often in ways we cannot now imagine. Curators a century ago had no idea how useful some of their specimens would be when later researchers subjected them to electron microscopy, X-rays, CT scans, and analyses of isotopes and DNA.
    In the 1800s, as part of its general collecting, the British Museum seized all opportunities to acquire specimens of Sphenodon punctatus , a reptile found only in New Zealand. In 1842 a curator, John Edward Gray, used some of the earliest material to describe and name the animal, assuming from its appearance that it was a kind of lizard. A subsequent curator, Albert Günther, who joined the museum in 1857, re-examined the same specimens and made his most important scientific discovery—that the tuatara, as Māori called it, was not a lizard at all, but the lone survivor of an order of reptiles that had died out everywhere else in the world at least sixty million years ago.
    Using other specimens, one of which is now at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, the ornithologist Walter Buller in 1877 described the distinctive tuatara from North Brother Island in Cook Strait as a new species and named it S. guntheri in Günther’s honour. In the 1980s the London specimens contributed to a study of the musculature of primitive reptiles, and helped an investigation that reconfirmed there are indeed two species of tuatara. In 2000, Richard Jakob-Hoff, a veterinarian at Auckland Zoo, familiarised himself with tuatara jawbones in Auckland Museum’s collection before operating on a captive tuatara with a jaw abscess. These examples show how taxpayers, ratepayers and donors who made possible the acquisition and storage of tuatara specimens in London, Christchurch and Auckland over many decades were supporting science for present and future generations.
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    As important as collections are, their usefulness would be severely limited without staff with the specialised knowledge and experience