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The insect collections of museums contain drawers of unidentified specimens which await the attention of specialists. This month a new species of butterfly, Splendeuptychia ackeryi (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), will be published in Zootaxa after being discovered by a curator from The Natural History Museum, Blanca Huertas.

Huertas collected S. ackeryi during an expedition to Columbia, but it wasn’t until the unidentified butterfly was compared with a museum specimens that entomologist realised it was the same as a 90 year old unidentified museum specimen. One of the distinguishing features of S. ackeryi which helped with the identification were its extremely hairly mouthparts.

I first read about this in a ScienceDaily article.

You can view some photographs on the NHM news page.

I’ve recently encountered the blog of Vince Smith, a cybertaxonomist who also works on parasitic lice (Phthiraptera) at The Natural History Museum (NHM), London . I came across his blog by accident whilst searching for articles on invasive invertebrates and ants. He has a number of posts about the NHM and a fusion of technology and biology.

The annual Orthopterists’ Meeting took place last week on Wednesday 19th November at The Natural History Museum. Whilst I was unable to arrive early enough for all the talks I managed to catch Peter Sutton’s lecture on ‘British Orthoptera, the current state of affairs’ which I shall discuss in a later post. His lecture was followed by the launch of the Orthoptera Recording Scheme website which will provide information on the Orthopteroids of the British Isles and enable the submission of sightings.

Anyone can submit sightings along with a photo to allow verification of the sighting identification. Once the record(s) has been verified they will be added to the National Biodiversity Network and the appropriate distribution map.

It will be interesting to follow the progress of the site and hopefully see more entomological recording sites in the future.