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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.