It happens more often than you'd think: Research scientists go digging around the dusty collections of your local natural history museum and find species hitherto unknown to science. Whatever sits on display when you visit — ancient human art, towering dinosaurs, slightly off-putting taxidermy — is just the tip of the iceberg. Countless specimens remain unseen, not just by museum patrons but often by staff as well.
"There's all this stuff that no one has ever had time to go through," Alexandra Boersma, who studies fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian, told The Washington Post. So, to find new species, all you have to do is wander around the museum's dustiest corridors. Along with her lab's principal investigator, Nicholas D. Pyenson, Boersma went hunting for interesting projects.
"Some of it has been sitting there for decades," Boersma said. "No one has gotten around to describing it."
On Tuesday, she and Pyenson introduced their latest find to the scientific community: a 25 million-year-old river dolphin they've dubbed Arktocara yakataga. The species, described for the -read more
No comments:
Post a Comment