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SUMMARY:The elephant in the room: historians and scientists working togeth
 er - Anna Marie Roos (University of Lincoln)
DTSTART:20140203T130000Z
DTEND:20140203T141500Z
UID:TALK49822@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Natalie Lawrence
DESCRIPTION:The understanding of Earth's biodiversity depends critically o
 n the accurate identification and nomenclature of species. Many species we
 re described centuries ago\, and in a surprising number of cases their nom
 enclature or type material remain unclear or inconsistent. A prime example
  is provided by _Elephas maximus_\, one of the most iconic and well-known 
 mammalian species\, described and named by Linnaeus (1758) and today desig
 nating the Asian elephant.  Morphological\, ancient DNA (aDNA)\, and high-
 throughput ancient proteomic analyses accomplished by scientists at the Na
 tural History Museum\, London and the University of Copenhagen demonstrate
 d that a widely discussed syntype specimen of _E. maximus_\, a complete 
 foetus preserved in ethanol\, is actually an African elephant\, genus Loxo
 donta.  Using my archival analysis of the travel accounts and letters of 1
 7th-century naturalist John Ray\, we further discovered that an additional
  _E. maximus_ syntype\, mentioned in a description by John Ray (1693) ci
 ted by Linnaeus\, has been preserved as an almost complete skeleton at the
  Natural History Museum of the University of Florence. Having confirmed it
 s identity as an Asian elephant through both morphological and ancient DNA
  analyses\, we designate this specimen as the lectotype of _E. maximus_\
 , the definitive type example of this species. This paper (recently publis
 hed in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society and the subject of ar
 ticles in Nature and Huffpost) is a case study of how historians of scienc
 e and scientists can work together to make discoveries of relevance to bot
 h fields.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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