About a year ago, I decided to set out on a major curatorial project, as one of my first large-scale projects for the herpetological collections of the Natural History Museum of Denmark (NHMD), where I am the curator of reptiles and amphibians. The project: to update the taxonomy and organisation system in place for the amphibians, and bring a little order and oversight into the chaos of the ages. Today, we finally finished that year-long process!
When the amphibian collection was last organised, it was done following the ‘Catalogue of the Batrachia Salientia S. Ecaudata in the Collection of the British Museum‘ by George Albert Boulenger, published in 1882. There is no disputing that this volume was one of the most influential taxonomic works on frogs of all time. Boulenger was a visionary. However, in the intervening 141 years, rather a lot has happened in the taxonomy of frogs, and a collection based more or less solely on this system can only feel anachronistic.
Even the frogs themselves didn’t seem happy with the arrangement
Before I was hired, the NHMD had been without a dedicated herpetological curator for some sixteen years. Before that, the post had been held from 1977–2005 by the eminent snake researcher, Jens B. Rasmussen, who sadly passed away at a young age. Jens’ work was really almost exclusively on snakes, and he left the amphibian collections largely untouched during his nearly-30-year tenure. Before him, the history of herpetology curators at the museum is surprisingly fuzzy—a subject into which I hope to delve in due course. What is clear, however, is that for a very long time—many decades at least—the NHMD has not had a curator who gave the amphibians much attention. And none has dared update the whole collection since it was last aligned with Boulenger’s catalogue.
That’s not to say that there were not active amphibian researchers working on the NHMD collections. Far from it! One particularly prolific researcher, Arne Schiøtz, deposited hundreds of frogs from East Africa our collection, and made major contributions to taxonomy, especially of hyperoliid reed frogs, based on these. Yet, work of this kind was mostly wedged into the existing structure, and not carefully curated and rearranged. After all, rearrangements are a huge hassle—you have to pull many (if not all) jars off the shelves, rearrange them, and put them back.
In principle, a system with missing taxa wedged into it where they seemed to fit would have been workable. But the final straw for me—the trigger for embarking on this project—was the discovery that some of the frog families, and even genera, were divided across the different shelving units. I don’t know how this happened, but the consequence was that anyone searching for a given specimen might have to look in multiple places (and know where those places were, first) in order to track it down.
A single tray in the collection that held frogs from six genera (two no longer valid) belonging to six different families
In addition to the taxonomic chaos, there was another problem. The jars themselves in the herpetology collection did not rest on the shelves, but instead resided in wooden trays, which were on the shelves. A given tray might hold specimens of a dozen species, usually without subdividers or any kind of order. A paper label was pinned or stuck to the front of each box, with a list of the species present inside the box, but I found that these lists were often wrong, either because a species was missing from the label, or present on the label and missing from the tray. To find all the specimens of a given species, you would often have to look at every single jar. You could not guess how many specimens of each species there would be without looking at all of them.
The frog collection before we embarked on the rearrangement
I have never seen a system like this at any other museum—please let me know if you know of any other herpetological collection that does this! Instead, every collection I have yet seen uses a system where the jars are kept in rows on the shelves, with a label of some kind at the front indicating the species. I find this to be far more practical. It makes rearranging based on individual species far more practical. It also gives a much better overview of how many jars of each species there are. This is particularly helpful, because the collection’s catalogue is still a long way from being fully digitised.
So, we set out to simultaneously rearrange the collection completely, and also change the system to this rank-and-file organisation. Progressively, we pulled every tray off the shelves, checked the identity of the jars in it, and worked through the alphabet, sorting by Family-Subfamily-Genus-Species, from Alsodidae to Telmatobiidae. Instead of Boulenger, we now follow the Amphibian Species of the World database. We hand-wrote little paper labels (placeholders until we can print long-term labels on card), and arranged the species in rows to go back onto the shelves. It will come as no surprise to readers familiar with this kind of work that the taxonomy of many specimens had changed, and we were able to update synonyms and other name changes as we went.
Finding the time for the project was a big challenge, as the collections manager, Daniel Klingberg Johansson, and I were seldom able to find time to work on it together. Fortunately, we were able to engage about a dozen volunteers over the last year, and together we cumulatively invested about 300 person-hours into the rearrangement. And today, we were finally able to put the last frogs back on the shelves.
A section of newly rearranged frogs (family Ptychadenidae). We are still using boxes for species where the number of jars exceeds what would constitute two rows, as it is convenient to be able to pull them all out at once. Note that the current paper species labels are placeholders; we will soon print new, robust ones.
In the process, I was also generating a dataset on the number of jars of each species we have in the collection, which gives us valuable new insights into the contents of the collection! Not including types (which are kept separately and have not yet been counted), we have ~590 species (just under 8% of all known frog species; total number not certain because of specimens labelled ‘sp.’ and some species complexes that need to be divided), in >3840 jars (over half of all species are represented by just a single jar). I cannot begin to estimate how many individual specimens that is, but mean specimens per jar is substantially greater than 1. Although species coverage is not great, we do have representatives of almost all families. The collection is a strong one, but it needs to continue to be expanded.
One way that we are currently working to expand it is to catalogue the many hundreds of uncatalogued, partly unidentified frogs. We have specimens from around the world, some of which have been sitting on the shelves for a century without being identified. In the coming years, I hope to dramatically decrease this fraction. If you are interested in coming and looking at some of our uninventoried material, please get in touch!