From the "You Don’t Know What You’ve Got 'til It's Gone Department": 2009 is becoming a year of discovery for bat species. The first was pretty easy to hide from everyone. Miniopterus aelleni, was discovered in June on an island off of Africa. It has been declared the world's smallest bat, not even making a scale hiccup at 0.17 ounces (or 5 grams).
On the other end of the scale, so to speak, is a large flying fox weighing a half pound and discovered in a slightly unusual bat habitat -- a 150 year old jar on a dusty shelf at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The species is currently unknown to science and is already extinct.
How Did The Bat Get In A Jar?
No, that's not the start of a dirty joke, but that's what some people are asking after the Academy of Natural Sciences published their find. It's expected for people to loose pens, marbles, a sense of purpose – but not a honkin' big bat corpse in an even bigger jar.
However, the amazing thing is not that one species has been discovered in this way – it's that more species will probably be discovered this way. And, like the pickled flying fox, they will probably be the last of their kind.
What happened was this – back in Victorian times, before nature documentaries were made, the only way any scientist could prove a new species existed was to kill it, preserve it and then ship it to a major museum for classification. This was one of the main jobs Charles Darwin had while he worked on the HMS Beagle.
It was thought this bat was shot on the Samoan island of Upolu in 1856 and then was shipped to Philadelphia, where it was preserved. Then, it got ignored among the other 15,000 specimens in jars lining the shelves at the Academy of Natural Sciences. It wasn't even an Academy of Natural Sciences employee that rediscovered it, but a visiting employee or the Smithsonian.
Short Sightedness
This bat isn’t the only creature discovered pickled in a jar of alcohol rather than its native habitat. Several years ago, not just one but EIGHT new species of walking stick insect was discovered on the shelves of the Academy of Natural Sciences. Recently, an extinct New Zealand giant gecko was discovered preserved in a French museum by Villanova University biologist Dr. Aaron Bauer. Whether any of the walking stick species still exists in the wild is unknown.
These discoveries are grim reminders that we really have no idea just what this planet contains and what it needs not only to survive, but to thrive. Although astounding that these specimens were lost for so many years, it's even more astounding to look at the remains of the species gone so we can see what all of us have lost.
