Half of the natural history specimens on display and in collections in museums around the world may be carrying the wrong identifying names, researchers in Great Britain say.
Even a highly expert naturalist can have trouble telling many species of plants and animals apart, with the result being that many specimens arriving in the world's museums end up being incorrectly labeled, say scientists at the University of Oxford and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Years and years of misnaming specimens at museums around the world have created more than just a bookkeeping problem, they say.
"Many areas in the biological sciences, including academic studies of evolution and applied conservation ... are underpinned by accurate naming," says Robert Scotland of Oxford's Plant Sciences department.
"Without accurate names on specimens, the records held in collections around the world would make no sense, as they don't correspond to the reality outside," he says.
As more and more of the world's museum collections go online, the problems are multiplied as vast amounts of specimens enter databases under incorrect names, he says.
The researchers, writing in the journal Current Biology, suggest three significant reasons why specimens are incorrectly named.
First, sufficient time and research needed to write up and identify specimens is simply not available.
Secondly, the pace of new species discovery is more than researchers can keep up with; 50 percent of the globe's specimens known in 2000 had been added to collections since 1969, they point out.
Finally, so many museums have sprung up around the globe that the pool of experts that can properly identify specimens is stretched too thin.
Properly identifying specimens, especially of rare plants or insects, sometimes falls to scientists at smaller museums who have little familiarity with the unusual species specimens they may be called on to classify and tag.
Of the 1.8 million different species on Earth described so far, 0.35 million are flowering plants, while 0.95 million are insects.
Although the researchers concentrated on plants for their study, finding names given to specimens of flowering plants were often incorrect, other studies have suggested things are even worse in the realm of insects.
"We think a conservative estimate is that up to half the world's natural history specimens could be incorrectly named," says study first author Zoë Goodwin, also of Oxford's Plant Sciences department.
