Some comments in the 'scientific names' thread below question the need for preserved specimens in taxonomic work, and make it seem that scientists fill buckets with dead animals, though they don't say why they think so. What's the story with these evil scientists? Why pickle anything?

It appears that these comments refer mostly to the preserved specimens that are listed in the formal descriptions of new species. In fact, at least one such specimen is required by the international code I described previously. This is called the 'holotype' or the 'type specimen', and in a formal sense that type specimen is the standard, the unique hard copy, of that species name. Type specimens are important for several reasons, and are usually kept in separate storage in major museums. This is an old practice – you can locate the type specimen for the great majority of species of organisms that have been described.

The next three paragraphs are details and examples – you can skip over them if you like.

(Let's start with those old type specimens, like those used to name Tupinambis indicus (= V. indicus) in 1802, or Hydrosaurus gouldii (=V. gouldii) in 1838. We know more about Indonesian and Australian monitors today, and many new species have been found in both areas. The original descriptions of those species are quite sketchy, and do not clearly distinguish them from closely-related species.)

(When Kai Philipp, Thomas Ziegler and Wolfgang Boehme discovered that two indicus-like species occurred on Ambon (where the original specimen of V. indicus came from), it was not clear which of the two was V. indicus, and which was new. By reference to the type of V. indicus, they were able to determine that that name referred to the widespread species, and described the new species with the restricted range as V. cerambonensis. In a similar fashion, when Ziegler and Boehme recognized that several species were mixed up in V. indicus on New Guinea, they were again able to sort them out using the type specimens for the previously-described species V. doreanus, V. finschii, and V. jobiensis. Because various European museums have saved preserved specimens collected over the past 200 years, Ziegler and Boehme could give approximate distributions for each of these newly-recognized species (and incidentally showed that V. doreanus and V. finschii also are native to far northern Queensland).

(In 1980, when Glen Storr recognized that there were two species of large monitors masquerading as V. gouldii, he named the other, new species as V. panoptes. Storr did not examine the type specimen of H. gouldii. Boehme later did, and found that Storr had gotten it backwards. By the Code, argus monitors should be called V. gouldii, and what everyone had long called V. gouldii picked up the next-oldest name, V. flavirufus. This was a recipe for a huge mess, and to preserve stability of usage the Commission accepted a substitute type specimen for V. gouldii from Perth, well outside of the range of argus monitors.)

Lots of details, but the main point is this: a type specimen ties a species name to a particular preserved individual animal, and does this because we do not know what the future may hold. Two hundred years from now that specimen still exists, and can be relied upon to settle any questions of identity that may arise. For these reasons, most scientific journals will not publish any description of a new species that lacks a preserved type specimen deposited in a the collection of an established museum.

That's one animal in a jar. All of the descriptions of new monitor species published in the last 100 years have that dead animal, but for most of those species the type specimen was selected to be an animal already long dead, and housed in a museum collection, often for decades. It's been only for those species for which there were no already-preserved specimens that a single animal has been killed to serve as the necessary, standard reference individual. Not talking buckets of dead lizards here, are we?

Museums are in fact rather like libraries – they accept and store a lot of stuff bit by bit, on the assumption that it will be valuable later. Specimens accumulate slowly, over many decades, but taxonomists will seek them out, worldwide, in the course of their work. For most species there are just not that many specimens, in fact. For example, Hans-Georg Horn and I recently completed a paper (not yet published) on V. salvadorii, and we surveyed all of the museums in the world for specimens. How many are there? There are 21, collected here and there across all of New Guinea over the past 150 years.

How many V. salvadorii are imported into the U.S. each year? The live export quota for croc monitors out of Indonesia averages about 500/year, and that quota is a low estimate of the numbers actually exported. How many croc monitors die each year in captivity? I would be willing to bet it's more than 20, and thus more than the total number of croc monitors ever taken from the wild by "evil scientists".

What happens to all of those dead captive crocs? How many of them were donated to museums? I found 3, worldwide. Would anyone care to offer an opinion as to who is wasting a resource here?

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