By Dr Chris Reid of the Australian Museum

Today, a little bit of esoterica.

What is a museum for? Hopefully, a museum includes education, research, exhibitions and local regional concerns. However, museums are primarily collections, and natural history museums, like ours, are collections of dead things.

From a zoologist’s perspective, the most important things in a museum collection are ‘primary types’. A primary type is a specimen that represents a scientifically named species. A zoological species, to the ordinary dog-walker in the street, or an ecologist, or a behaviourist, or geneticist, say, is all of the individuals of a kind of animal, say a dog, so all dogs. But in my job, the species is based on just one specimen, which is the primary type (aka the name-bearing type). This means that there are different concepts of species for different people, but the most important thing is that the scientific name is based on a single specimen.

Taxonomists, like me, get to decide what that specimen should be. So, if you like, we get first dibs at the species concept – other, um, lesser mortals, like ecologists, geneticists and behaviourists, can refine or wrestle with that concept, but we come first. Science is hypothesis driven and ours is the first hypothesis of the species.

Basically, all named zoological species (I’m carefully avoiding plants as they have different rules) have primary types. The only obvious exception is Homo sapiens – no museum has a carefully laid out corpse labelled as the reference point for all of us (if there was, who would you pick?).

Museums are where types are kept, for perpetuity, since, yes there are often plenty of arguments about species, and the primary types may get a lot of attention.

Dogs are a good case in point. The guy who started all of this scientific naming business, Carolus Linnaeus, named the domestic dog Canis familiaris in 1758 and there’s a type in a Swedish museum. That was the first hypothesis.

But we now know from genetic studies that domestic dogs were domesticated about 25,000 years ago from wolves, Canis lupus, also named by Linnaeus in 1758, so in this current hypothesis the ‘dog’ no longer exists as a separate species. That includes dingos, brought in to Australia by humans about 5000 years ago. So that’s a wolf you are walking.

But the problem with mammals is that we know too much about them (!), so there’s often a lot of conflict in species concepts, depending on what aspect is being studied.

In beetles, no such luck, we generally know only what’s on the labels. I’ve recently reviewed a group of five species of dung beetle, two of which turned out to be ‘new’ – i.e. nobody had described them before. But since they are all rather similar and one of the first species to be discovered wasn’t described very well I needed to check its primary type. It’s pictured above, with all its labels, collected in the 1860s near Geraldton in Western Australia (but just labelled ‘New Holl’), and deposited in the Natural History Museum, London. It’s in almost perfect condition because it is an obligation of all museums to look after types.