The Lost Species

Great Expeditions in the Collections of Natural History Museums

Christopher Kemp

University of Chicago Press 2020

Pb, 271pp, £17, ISBN 9780226513706

You don’t have to clamber up the Himalayan foothills, hack your way through the Congo or trek across north-east India to find unknown species. Instead, root around the collections of natural history museums, where millions of species await discovery. Or just

open your back door.

Christopher Kemp recounts how a researcher found an “unusually large” rove beetle in a box of bugs from London’s Natural History Museum. Darwin collected the beetle ( Darwinilus sedarisi) when he visited Argentina in 1832. Some 180 years later, this attractive beetle was finally named and described scientifically.

Finding a previously undescribed beetle may not have the cachet of discovering the Yeti, Mokele-mbembe or Buru. But take the time to learn about them (Richard Jones’s Beetles in the New Naturalist series is a superlative introduction) and they’re fascinating.

The Lost Species is essential for anyone with even a passing interest in biology (crypto- or otherwise). Kemp describes, for example, how unrecognised species hide in plain sight. In 2014, researchers published the first description of the Atlantic Coast leopard frog ( Rana kauffeldi) based on a specimen collected on New York’s Staten Island. In 2015, entomologists reported that they had discovered 30 new species of fly trapped in backyards across Los Angeles.

As Kemp comments: “Unknown biodiversity is everywhere… Go stand in your backyard and it’s there.”

Sometimes biologists rely on remarkably scant evidence, which could offer solace to cryptozoologists struggling with the same problem. Herpetologists know a species of African squeaker frog ( Arthroleptis kutoguanda) from just two specimens collected in 1899 and 1930. Entomologists described a longhorn beetle ( Pseudicator kingsleyae) from a single specimen collected in 1896 in Ghana by explorer Mary Kingsley, whose life would make a great movie or documentary.

Indeed, Kemp eloquently conveys the passion that scientists have about their field, even if it’s as seemingly esoteric as sexing flies, which depends on closely examining genitalia. A bean weevil’s ( Callosobruchus maculatus) impressive penis is topped “with a bristling cluster of spikes like a mediæval mace”. (Google it!)

A thread running through the book eloquently emphasises why we must maintain and adequately fund natural history collections. After all, we live in the midst of the sixth extinction (the last one wiped out the dinosaurs). As Kemp notes: “How can we protect an animal we haven’t named?”

The Lost Species is a compelling, fascinating, accessible yet scientifically robust book that I can’t recommend too highly.

Mark Greener

★★★★★