What one extinct bird tells us about the role of museums

One day in August 1875, a grayish blue parrot was shot down on a small island of the Indian Ocean near Mauritius. It was the last time that Rodrigues parakeet was known to be seen alive.

This bird was one of only two never preserved. Exactly 150 years later, both rest under us at the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, England. Aside from a few fossilized fragments, they represent the only physical evidence that the species has ever existed.

For many missing animals, museums are now their last remaining habitat. Without these collections, we would not only have lost the creatures themselves – we would have lost the very knowledge that they existed at all. This can be considered a double extinction.

While I explore in my recent book, “Nature’s Memory: behind the scenes of museums of natural history of the world”, those of us who work in museums take responsibility for protecting proof with the species with which we have shared our planet and how this diversity has changed over time. Our collections are constantly used to learn the lessons of past losses and this role has never increased only over time.

Sexual extinction and bias

There are some enigmatic stories of green and blue parrots by brown sailors on Rodrigues in the 1700s, but a specimen was collected until 1871. It was at this point that the British colonial administrator of Mauritius, Edward Newton, received a female bird that had never been scientifically described. (Scientists must write an official “description” of a new species so that it is officially recognized).

Newton sent the preserved parakeet to his brother Alfred Newton – the most eminent ornithologist in Great Britain and the first zoology teacher at the University of Cambridge – who described the new printed species.

This does something of it with rarity: only a quarter of bird species are described using female samples, which means that in most cases, the male form is actually considered to be the standard representation of its species, while the female is considered “the other”.

By the way, although women have always played a major role in natural history, only 8% of birds named after people are named after women. This is one of the reasons why I call this species as “Rodrigues Paraket”, named after its original island, preferably on its other name, Newton’s parakeet (although ironically, in this specific case, the island is also appointed according to a man).

In another demonstration of human social gender biases which underpin a large part of natural history, having had the opportunity to publish an illustration of the specimen parallel to its description, Alfred Newton wrote that “as it is unfortunately that of a female bird, I refrain from giving one”. He was holding for a man.

Mainly due to deforestation due to agriculture on Rodrigues, over a century, the population of perruche in the past common has crashed. When other research for the bird has failed, Newton finally provided an illustration of the species – still based on this single woman.

The same year, when we were killed on August 14, 1875, Edward Newton was finally able to send his brother the male he wanted. None has ever been revised, and it is quite possible that it is the real endur: the last living member of his species.

Precious little remains

Many extinction tales, and in fact the museums of natural history which say them, are linked to colonialism. Dodos, from Maurice Voisin, has become the ultimate icons of extinction in part because they are relatively common in museums around the world.

Edward Newton played a role again: he was the colonial manager of the island in 1865 – almost 200 years after the extinction of the dodo – when the Indian contract workers were ordered to extract hundreds of dodo bones from a Mauritian marsh, feeling for them in the mud with their bare feet. It is the origin of almost all dodo bones in museums today.

However, countless other lost species, such as the Rodrigues parakeet, are only represented by one or two specimens. Without museums preserving these precious remains, we could never understand what has been lost. Beyond scientific research, these specimens offer visitors to the museum a tangible link with the permanent reality of extinction.

Found, lost, described

It is not only a history of the 19th century. In 2000, for example, a single lizard in the snake eyes was collected during work on the ground on a wooded plateau in the northwest of India. It was kept in the vast collections of the Bombay Natural History Society, before being described as a new species 20 years later: Ophisops Agarwali.

But when the researchers returned to his habitat, they could no longer find the lizard. They concluded that it is probably extinguished, probably due to traditional forest combustion practices.

The lizard was captured just in time to be recognized, but not in time to be saved.

Why these losses now count

Like the lizard, the story of Rodrigues Parakeet is not only a quirk of natural history – it is a warning. Around the world, species are lost much faster than we can name them. It is a sad truth that there are species not described in museum stores which can no longer be found in their wild habitats. Some become extinct in the window between the collection and the description.

When we keep these fragments, we keep more than a specimen. We keep a trace of what the planet once held.

If this only lizard had not been captured in 2000, or if these parakeets had not been stored in 1875, the existence of their species would never have been recognized and no longer its loss. We are both richer and poorer for this knowledge.

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