Until recently, this strange little creature, the long-beaked echidna, was thought to be extinct.
That is UNTIL... the (re)discovery of a"very well-documented specimen" in the Natural History Museum of London. Scientists had believed the species disappeared thousands of years ago.
"[Scientist Kristofer] Helgen said he was visiting the Natural History Museum in London to look at its collections when he happened upon a skinned long-beaked echidna that was neatly tagged with the species name and where it was discovered. It turns out that in 1901, an Australian naturalist named John Tunney shot the echidna on Mount Anderson, a mountain in a vast, arid and sparsely populated region of northwest Australia, [...] stuffed and delivered the specimen, which was later bequeathed to the Natural History Museum. There it lay forgotten for a century..."
"The discovery not only points to the importance of maintaining museum collections, it radically changes the picture of long-beaked echidnas."
So, shout-outs for good documentation (aka metadata) and preservation practices! Turns out these guys might be alive today. They're just really good at hiding.
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Another interesting tidbit of news appeared, unexpected and as unlikely as this may be, on BuzzFeed not long ago. The title: "Inside the Army's Spectacular Hidden Treasure Room." Which makes me think archives could solve some of their problems by simply renaming themselves Spectacular Hidden Treasure Rooms. ('What do you do for a living?' 'Oh, I'm a spectacular hidden treasure keeper, you?') So, I will forgive the poor copy editing and sloppy terminology in recognition of BuzzFeed's sheer enthusiasm. It's like you can tell when someone has just realized, for the very first time, that no, not "everything" is on the internet. There's not even "everything" in a form that is accessible to the public. CRAY-ZAY, I know. If this gets people's attention and gets them to care at all about cultural heritage, then I say yay to BuzzFeed. Perhaps we should think about incorporating cat memes into our finding aids too?
