Thanks to the scientific journal Nature, the history-biology continuum is alive and full of intrigue as the story below shows (click here for a podcast related to the same story):
Before leaving for the Philippines as an undergraduate in 1992, Rafe Brown scoured his supervisor’s bookshelf to learn as much as he could about the creatures he might encounter. He flipped through a photocopy of a 1922 monograph by the prolific herpetologist Edward Taylor, and became mesmerized by a particular lizard, Ptychozoon intermedium, the Philippine parachute gecko. With marbled skin, webs between its toes and aerodynamic flaps along its body that allow it to glide down from the treetops, it was just about the strangest animal that Brown had ever seen.
Brown learned that Taylor had collected the first known example, or type specimen, near the town of Bunawan in 1912, and had deposited it at the Philippine Bureau of Science in Manila. But the specimen had been destroyed along with the building during the Second World War, and the species had never been documented again in that part of the country. “What are the chances I’m going to see one of the rarest geckos in the world?” he wondered.
He was driven by more than curiosity. Given the rampant deforestation in that part of the Philippines, he wanted to determine whether the species still existed there and if so, how similar it was to geckos collected in other areas. He wanted to see, in other words, whether Taylor’s 70-year-old taxonomic decisions were still valid.
On their first night in the field, Brown and his colleagues drove to the edge of the forest and caught two red eyes in the beam of a headlamp. It was aPtychozoon. Back at their hotel, Brown photographed the gecko, took tissue samples for DNA sequencing, and carefully prepped it and stuck it in a jar. It became the neotype to replace Taylor’s lost specimen, and in 1997, Brown published a new description of the species1. It marked the start of an obsession.
Brown made his career studying biodiversity in the Philippines over the next two decades, he could not escape Taylor’s long shadow. The elder herpetologist had logged 23 years in the field over his lifetime, collecting more than 75,000 specimens around the world, and naming hundreds of new species.
There is a darker side to Taylor’s legacy, however. He was a racist curmudgeon beset by paranoia — possibly a result of his mysterious double life as a spy for the US government. He had amassed no shortage of enemies by the time he died in 1978. An obituary noted that he was, to many, “a veritable ogre—and woe to anyone who incurred his wrath”2. More damaging, perhaps, were the attacks on his scientific reputation. After the loss of his collection in the Philippines, many of the species he had named were declared invalid or duplicates. The standards of taxonomy had advanced beyond Taylor’s quaint descriptions, and without the specimens to refer to, his evidence seemed flimsy.
Nevertheless, Brown felt a connection with his maligned predecessor. It was a bond that intensified when, in 2005, Brown became curator of herpetology at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum in Lawrence, the same institution at which Taylor had spent much of his career. Over the years, Brown has rebuilt some of Taylor’s collection and resurrected many of his species. Now, as he finishes a major monograph on a group of Philippine frogs, he is more convinced than ever: “Taylor was right.”
Brown’s reassessment could prove crucial. Since Taylor’s time, taxonomy has become more than just a naming exercise. Designating a group of organisms as a new species, or lumping it in with an old one, can affect the animals’ legal protection and influence the allocation of scarce conservation resources. Amphibian declines, in particular, have made headlines around the world, and the Philippines ranks second only to Sri Lanka for sheer proportions of imperilled species: 79% of Philippine amphibians are found nowhere else on Earth, and 46% are under threat of extinction. But following Taylor’s trail has given Brown cause for optimism. “A lot of the things people thought were extinct,” he says, “if you go right where Taylor said to go, you can find them.”
A lust for adventure
On the fourth floor of the Kansas museum, Brown is walking through the herpetological collections. Lizards float upside down in yellow-tinged alcohol. Snakes coil like corkscrews, and two dozen tiny, dark frogs embrace in a specimen jar. On one shelf, the jars have red ribbons tied around their lids to signify that their contents are type specimens: the standards on which species descriptions are based.
When scientists disagree on whether something is a new species or a variant of a known one, they often need to refer back to the type specimen or even return to where it was collected. Brown opens a jar and extracts a small lizard that has a tin tag tied to its waist with twine. It is one of Taylor’s originals, on loan from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. “Preserved properly, well labelled and deposited in a safe institution,” says Brown, “these will last forever.”
That is the kind of legacy to which every taxonomist aspires, and Taylor was no exception. Born in Maysville, Missouri, on 23 April 1889, he was still a teenager when he began depositing specimens at this museum. At 23, he joined the civil service and became what he called “a one-man Peace Corps” in the Philippines — then a US territory — setting up a school for members of a headhunting tribe in central Mindanao, where he collected the parachute gecko among other species. Next, he worked for the fisheries department in Manila and then completed his PhD on Philippine mammals, but his true passion was always herpetology. It came at the expense of just about everything else in his life. “I named about 500 species,” he would later tell a reporter, “but I can’t always remember the names of my own children.” His wife, Hazel, could not bear his long absences, and they divorced in 1925.
By then, Taylor had described more species than most of his peers could achieve in a lifetime: 42 amphibians, 40 lizards and 30 snakes. He sold some of his specimens to museums in the United States, but many remained at the Bureau of Science in Manila, where he thought they would be secure forever. He joined the faculty at Kansas in 1926, and over the next two decades he wandered the globe from Mexico and Costa Rica to parts of Africa, lugging a folding army cot and subsisting on rice and evaporated milk as he collected specimens.
In his 60s, however, Taylor found himself under attack. In 1954, Robert Inger, a herpetologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, published a withering taxonomic review of Philippine amphibians3. Inger, who studied only specimens in museums, axed 44 of the 87 species that Taylor had personally named or approved. “The differences between Taylor’s frogs will be recognized as the differences to be expected between individuals,” Inger wrote. In other words, Taylor was a hack. On his personal copy of Inger’s text, Taylor scribbled the word, “Hooey.”
More recently, herpetologists have levelled other serious allegations against Taylor’s character. In 1993, the Kansas Herpetological Society posthumously published his 1916 master’s thesis on Kansas reptiles. In a foreword, one of his former students, Hobart Smith, revealed that Taylor had plagiarized large sections from the nineteenth-century palaeontologist and herpetologist Edward Drinker Cope. For those who knew Taylor as a man of principle, it was a devastating revelation, but it also explained why Taylor had never tried to publish the work himself. Then, in 2002, herpetologist Jay Savage at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, charged that Taylor had secretly copied the field notes of a rival in order to scoop him on his next collecting trip to Costa Rica4.
Taylor had other demons. He had voiced support for eugenics programmes and reportedly refused to take on Jewish students. Brown makes no apologies for the man, but Taylor’s reputation — for good or ill — is intertwined with the history of the Kansas museum. “In the end, we consider him our own,” says Brown.
A legacy revisited
Brown’s interest in Taylor grew when he was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1990s. He devoured Taylor’s monographs to plan his own collecting. He hunted through museum records to find out where Taylor’s specimens were, and made visits to see them at the Field Museum and the California academy. But time and time again, he came to a dead end when he wanted information on type specimens that Taylor had deposited at the Philippine Bureau of Science.
He soon learned the tragic story of that institution: in February 1945, when US General Douglas MacArthur launched an all-out attack on Manila to expel the Japanese occupiers, the Bureau of Science was reduced to rubble, and all of its botanical and zoological specimens were destroyed, including 32 of Taylor’s type specimens. “The loss is an irreplaceable one,” Taylor’s friend Elmer Merrill, a legendary botanist, wrote in Science5. Plant specimens were gradually replenished, but no one had systematically tried to replicate Taylor’s efforts. For many years, hostile tribes kept most interlopers away from species-rich regions. In the 1990s, threats of terrorism made it difficult to access places such as the Sulu Archipelago, where Taylor collected types for a dozen species. Despite the danger, Brown resolved to retrace Taylor’s steps…
Read the whole story here.
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