There is good news for plant conservation in South Africa and internationally.
Attenborougharion rubicundus is one of more than a dozen species named after the legendary naturalist Sir David Attenborough.
Simon Grove/Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
Scientists have been naming species after well-known people since the 18th century, often in a bid for publicity. But the issue deserves attention – 400,000 Australian species are yet to be described.
Ulysses butterflies (Papilio ulysses) in CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection, Canberra.
CSIRO
Australian taxonomy resources number around 70 million specimens, valued at over AU$5 billion. That’s big science.
Specimens in herbaria include “pickled” plants in pots (shown here), dried specimens and fruits or seeds preserved whole.
Ainsley Calladine, State Herbarium of South Australia
Australia’s herbaria are a priceless repository, holding around 8 million samples that map historical and current distributions of native and introduced plant species in Australia.
Humans have an innate interest and ability in naming biologically meaningful entities, or species. Taxonomy, then, vies for the title of world’s “oldest profession”.
The endangered ‘fishing cat’ is known to scientists as Prionailurus viverrinus, but is Felis viverrinus in Chinese wildlife law.
Gemma Simpson / shutterstock
You might worry that people care more about what’s on their smartphone than what’s in their local wildlife park. But what if we could get them to care about both at the same time?
Scientific evidence shows overwhelmingly that people across the world are genetic refugees from Africa.
Shutterstock
Despite science refuting the existence of different human races, people have used “race” throughout history to divide and denigrate certain people while promoting their claims of superiority.
New forms of life are discovered in high-tech ways that leave yesterday’s natural history collections in the dust.
Detective image via www.shutterstock.com.
Plants mentioned in ancient Chinese books helped inspire the latest Nobel Prize for Medicine winner, but testing old remedies isn’t as simple as following the recipe.
What do collections of dead butterflies do for their still-living counterparts?
Andrew D Warren
The dead animal specimens that comprise natural history collections contribute a lot toward scientific understanding of their still-living counterparts – and those that have gone extinct.
Is it a … or a ….? Dengrogramma enigmatica, discovered in deep water off the coast of Victoria, doesn’t quite fit in anywhere in the animal family tree.
Jørgen Olesen
New technology to tackle biosecurity challenges down the track is one of the five megatrends identified in today’s CSIRO report Australia’s Biosecurity Future: preparing for future biological challenges…
When is a cat not a cat?
Biodiversity Heritage Library (adapted)
A cat is, of course, a cat. Lions are cats too, as are leopards, lynxes and so on – the “Felidae” family contains 41 species in total. But what about other closely related species such as hyenas or mongooses…
What do Beyonce, Hitler, David Attenborough, Darth Vader and GoldenPalace.com all have in common? They all have species named after them. In the case of Beyonce it is an Australian horse fly whose striking…
No, it’s nothing to do with a reptilian existential crisis – just a name game.
melanie cook/Flickr
You have likely been to a zoo at some point and visited their reptile house. A building where the climate control dial is stuck on the “wet sauna” setting, and filled with maniacal children competing to…
Sorry guys, if you are smaller than 1 mm, you can’t be a species.
Microbe World
Despite their small size, organisms smaller than thousandth of a metre (1 mm) contribute greatly to biodiversity and ecosystem function. Unfortunately, categorising small organisms, even defining those…