“Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums“, written by Lance Grande, published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2017 (hardback, 412 pages)

Grande originally studied fish palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History, and in September 1983 was hired as a curator of fossil fishes at the Field Museum. The first few chapters tell of his early interest in natural history and palaeontology, including his work digging up fossil fish in Wyoming. He has written much more about the wonderfully preserved fossil assemblages found here in The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Scenes from Deep Time.

But much more than his own story, Grande introduces the reader to the colourful cast of colleagues that were influential in developing his career. This includes eccentric, larger-than-life characters such as Shelton Pleasants Applegate who studied fossil fish in Mexico, or the golden-tongued Willy Bemis, who could talk any sport fisherman out of a fish skeleton in exchange for a first-class filleting job.

A large chapter deals with a particularly well-publicised episode that tangentially involved both the Field Museum and Grande himself: the T. rex skeleton nicknamed Sue. The tumultuous story of how this fossil was excavated and became the subject of a custody battle involving the Department of Justice and the FBI has been told at length elsewhere (see e.g. Rex Appeal: The Amazing Story of Sue, the Dinosaur That Changed Science, the Law and My Life and Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T-Rex Ever Found). Grande adds a unique and even-handed side to this story from the perspective of a curator – both when he was questioned regarding previous dealings with the fossil hunter who dug up this specimen, and, more significantly, when the Field Museum acquired this fossil when it was auctioned off.

“even when he touches on […] the details of executive management or the financial woes of a large museum in a time of economic crisis, he manages to captivate”

Grande honours many other colleagues, including a whirlwind chapter that gives short introductions to his current fellow curators at the museum, as well as past curators such as the famed herpetologist Karl Patterson Schmidt. To his credit, even when he touches on his time as vice president and lays bare the details of executive management or the financial woes of a large museum in a time of economic crisis, he manages to captivate.

A final three chapters cover more sensitive topics such as dealing with human remains and their repatriation, and the importance of museums and their collections for ongoing conservation efforts. The latter topic is one that I touched on in my review of Christopher Kemp’s wonderfully written The Lost Species: Great Expeditions in the Collections of Natural History Museums. Museum collections provide unique snapshots of species diversity throughout recent history and are vital repositories when describing new species. The Field Museum stands out in particular for the Rapid Biological Inventories they do nowadays, where a team of zoologists and botanists is blitzed into a tropical location to do a taxonomic inventory in the course of a few weeks, after which they draw up an advisory report in several languages. These have more than once led to the establishment of protected areas in tropical countries.

“[…] it is a beautifully presented book. The publisher really went to town on Curators“

Grande does not avoid the difficult topic of collection ethics. Like many other museums of a similar age (the Field Museum was established in 1893), their collections were in large part brought together during a time when people did not yet frown as much on plunder, colonialism, and hunting. Grande is frank in discussing this and does not attempt to hide the troubled past of some collections, but also highlights current practices that meet far higher ethical standards. Even so, there were chapters that made me feel conflicted. In his chapter on the Hall of Gems, he describes the lengths they went to to ensure that all the minerals sourced were ethically mined. But Grande seems to be okay attending the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo with Willy Bemis to obtain skeletons of deep-sea fish. One can argue that these sport fishing events will happen anyway, whether or not two museum curators try and take away some of the scraps for museum collections. But something tells me that if they approached trophy hunters in Africa in the same fashion to obtain skeletons of lions or elephants, there would be a public outcry.

Having said that, the fact that Grande covers these complexities – the shades of grey you have to deal with at times, the unique occasions where there are no precedents – makes Curators a revelatory and mature portrait of his profession. I also need to add here that it is a beautifully presented book. The publisher really went to town on Curators, producing a chunky, full-colour book printed on thick, high-quality paper, with each chapter followed by sizable sections of colour photos. If you enjoyed Richard Fortey’s Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, or Kemp’s work mentioned above, or you are fascinated by museums, then this book comes highly recommended.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Curators hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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So, scientists describe new species of plants and animals all the time. This much you probably know. What might come as a surprise, however, is that many of these discoveries are not made in the field, but in the massive natural history collections housed in museums around the world. In The Lost Species, Christopher Kemp takes the reader on a tour through the collections to reveal the stories behind some of these discoveries.

“The Lost Species: Great Expeditions in the Collections of Natural History Museums”, written by Christopher Kemp, published by The University of Chicago Press in November 2017 (hardback, 250 pages)

The book is divided into two parts, one with ten chapters on vertebrates, the other with twelve chapters on invertebrates (sorry botanists and palaeontologists, you were given only one chapter each). Kemp goes well beyond just giving us a dry description of the details of each species. Each newly described species has a story to tell, multiple stories often. Stories of their initial collection – sometimes by luminaries such as president Roosevelt (a tapir), Alfred Russel Wallace (a cichlid) or Charles Darwin himself (a beetle) – that are livened up by passages from diaries or letters. But also stories of their subsequent rediscovery and description. Stories of perseverance and hard work, of researchers spending years of their life visiting museum collections or borrowing specimens to compare all the known material and become self-taught experts on a species in the process. Stories of curiosity, of people hungering to better understand our world and the creatures that live in it. Above all, it seems, stories of serendipity and luck, of being in the right place at the right time, of opening up jars or drawers in the cavernous depths of off-limits storage facilities and realising:”Hey, I have never seen anything like this before”. And even where Kemp describes the species, his prose is lyrical, poetic sometimes. To give you an example:

“under a microscope a cynipid wasp is beautiful: black and streamlined like a miniature fighter jet […] compound eyes glint like chrome mesh” [p. 99]

In Kemp’s hands, zoologist Eric Hoberg, who specialises in parasitic worms, becomes the keeper of a house of horrors, one of his study subjects “emerging from a dead grasshopper in a squirming coil like a magic trick no one wants to see”. There are moments that Kemp had me laughing out loud when describing the sometimes bizarre and otherworldly creatures that surround us.

I think it is safe to say that if natural history museums have a dirty little secret it is that collecting specimens is much less time-consuming than describing species. As a consequence of centuries of collection efforts by naturalists and explorers, the world’s natural history museums are overflowing with literally billions of specimens (which does raise some troubling questions about how money and effort is allocated…). Much of this material goes undescribed, a large chunk (Kemp quotes estimates of as much as 50%!) has been misidentified. For many groups, only highly-trained specialists (taxonomists) can make the distinction between species, and recognising and describing new ones can take years of painstaking work. The situation is only made worse by the lack of curators and qualified taxonomists. And seeing that many of these species are not necessarily the sexiest (nematodes, anyone?) funding cuts are making the chronic shortage of money and manpower only worse. The amount of work that remains to be done is dizzying and sobering at the same time. We would need armies of taxonomists to get to grips with it. The Lost Species is filled with real-life examples of the unknowns that DeNicola described in theoretical terms in Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know.

“natural history museums have a dirty little secret […] collecting specimens is much less time-consuming than describing species”

You might ask “Who cares?” Does it really matter whether we know that some bandicoot scurrying through the undergrowth of a tropical forest in Papua New Guinea is not actually one, but two species? Or that some genus of tarantula in the United States was incorrectly described by a 19th-century systematist and that several species turn out to be one and the same? This goes right to the heart of the question why we should care about biodiversity at all, something I wrote more about in my review of Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics.

It is a question Kemp brings up throughout the book. Obviously, he thinks it does matter, for the simple reason that you cannot protect that which you do not know. Before we can even talk about the biology of a species or its role in an ecosystem, it needs to have a name. To understand the world around us, how it is changing, and what it was like in the past, you need to have names for the creatures that inhabited it then and now. Without these labels, without these identities, we cannot even begin to have a conversation.

Full of wonder and adventure, The Lost Species is an amazing read that I simply could not put down. It made me search the internet for citizen science projects to see how I can help out unlocking some of this knowledge (seems I have just missed the London NHM’s volunteer project to transcribe information from the specimen labels of microscopic fossils). Taxonomists and curators have a great advocate and standard-bearer in Kemp and are indebted to him for putting their work and its importance in the limelight. Simply put, this book should be in the shop of every natural history museum and is a great read next to Lance Grande’s Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Lost Species paperback, hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review: