Apr 30 2019
In the museum world, there's a sort of joke that you never know what you might find in specimen storage areas - undescribed species new to science, species that may be extinct in the wild, maybe even something collected by the likes of Charles Darwin.
This week, that's exactly what happened. While doing an inventory of unidentified liverworts from South America in storage (not yet cataloged or in the herbarium), we found a packet with a paper-clipped slip of paper reading "Note: 3 Darwin collections enclosed"
We opened the packet and found this beautiful collection of Frullania collected by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands in 1835. The large collection is actually a syntype - one of multiple collections used by Thomas Taylor to describe a new species, Frullania aculeata Taylor.
The three specimens all say they came from the Henslow Museum, which is likely the Ipswich Museum, a natural history museum that was established in 1847. John Stevens Henslow was elected president of the Ipswich museum in 1850, but is better known as an important mentor to Charles Darwin. It was Henslow who was originally supposed to be the naturalist on the HMS Beagle, but when he turned down the post he suggested Darwin take his place, and so history was made.