The Centenary celebration at the Academy of Natural Sciences... The bicentenary will be a far less formal affair.
Two hundred years ago today a group of seven prominent Philadelphians: two physicians, a dentist, an apothecary, a manufacturing chemist, a distiller and naturalist Thomas Say formally founded the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the first natural history museum in North American. Today and for the next year the Academy will hold events celebrating its long history of contribution to natural history research.
Over the past 200 years the Academy has played a continuing role in advancing natural history research from the myriad contributions of entomologist/malacologist/ herpetologist Thomas Say, to Ruth Patrick‘s work testing the predictions MacArthur and Wilson‘s theory of island biogeography, and Ted Daeschler’s co-discovery and analysis of transitional fish-tetrapod fossils. This being Anole Annals, read on for a summary of the Academy’s contributions to the anole world…
Among natural history museums on HerpNet, the anole collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences is in the middle of the pack relative in terms of total number of specimen lots, but the collection’s strength lies in quality and history rather than quantity. Roughly 6% of the Academy’s Anolis lots contain type material. The collection contains 22 holotypes, 33 paratypes and 55 syntypes of anole species and subspecies. Many of these were described by one of the kings of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy, Edward Drinker Cope, although some have since been synonymized (eg. Anolis cinnamomeus and A. moorei are both synonyms of A. scriptus).
The collection also has historical significance. The median collection date for anole specimens is 1946. Five percent of lots were collected prior to 1900 and nearly 60% before 1950. For comparison, the median collection date for specimens in the massive Anolis collection at MCZ is 1968, about 1% of specimens were collected prior to 1900 and 12% prior to 1950. Early collection records provide a baseline for past distributions, communities and morphology. Analyzing these data in a comparative context could identify evolutionary and ecological responses to habitat and/or climate change. I’m not aware of this type of study in anoles, but a similar approach was taken in investigating changes to songbird wing morphology in response to habitat change over 100 years in North America.
Finally, 43 publications between 1854 and 1971 in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences include the keywords “anole” or “Anolis“. These include species descriptions, distributional monographs and descriptive morphological studies.
The Academy holds a very special place in my heart. My interest in natural history was fostered by my visits to the museum as a child; before starting my PhD, I managed their molecular labs and frozen tissue collections; and my wife and I were married in Dinosaur Hall. If you are in Philadelphia over the next year, be sure to pay the Academy a visit. Although you won’t see anything anole related in the public part of the museum, those interested in natural history and the history of natural history won’t be disappointed.
- John David Curlis - March 1, 2022
- Joe Macedonia - January 31, 2022
- Lindsey Swierk - January 27, 2022
Yoel Stuart
Great post Anthony. I’m going to be in Philly this weekend. Maybe I can persuade my group to go to the museum!
I would be interesting to go back to those pickled collections and compare them to current populations. One thing we have to get a handle on first is how specimens change size and shape during the preservation process. If limb, head, and other dimensions change disproportionately to body size, it would be hard to discern actual evolutionary change from preservation artifacts.
geneva
Thanks Yoel. Hopefully you can make it. Bonus points if you find the corny picture of me in the museum.
Great point on preservation-induced changes to morphology. Does anyone out there knows if this has been investigated?
Yoel Stuart
I’ve heard rumors of a couple experiments started to examine this point and there may even be a poster from a herp meeting floating out there but nothing concrete that I’ve seen.
gabriel gartner
Yoel and Anthony:
Jonathan and I talked about this a bit so maybe discuss it with him, but it’s very difficult to quantify because it’s so dependent on EtOH concentrations, how often jars are changed etc.. I can’t remember–is it just soft tissue, or bones as well? If only the former, than x-rays might still be useful.
gabriel gartner
p.s. Why do we not have banquets like this any more?
Luke Mahler
Great post Anthony! The ANSP has some pretty important anoles, like the only known specimen of Anolis laevis, the least known of the proboscis anoles. It was described by Cope, of course.
I’d love to visit the collections at some point. Among other things, it’s possible that one or more specimens of the infamous Anolis roosevelti passed through there at one point – in fact, possibly the first specimen or specimens collected. In an 1861 paper, Cope remarked in a single line of text that Anolis cuvieri (then known as Xiphosurus velifer) was found on the island of Vieques. Much much later, Greg Mayer determined that Anolis roosevelti was collected at around this time from Vieques, while specimens of A. cuvieri have never been collected from the Puerto Rican Bank islands. Whatever Cope saw that spurred him to assign A. cuvieri to Vieques, it was almost certainly a specimen of Anolis roosevelti. The species is quite similar to cuvieri, and it wasn’t actually described until 1931, so it would have been an easy mistake to make. Sadly, Cope didn’t give any details on what led him to assert that Xiphosurus velifer occurred on Vieques. It’s likely he received a specimen of it at the ANSP – he in fact received many specimens there from an apothecary based in the Puerto Rican Bank islands. No one has been able to locate such a specimen, of course.
Who knows – maybe there’s a roosevelti specimen lurking around the ANSP somewhere!
For more on this, check out Chapter 2 of Greg Mayer’s fantastic 1989 PhD thesis.
Some refs:
Cope, E. D. (1861). Notes and descriptions of anoles. Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 13, 208-215.
Grant, C. (1931). A new species and two new subspecies of the genus Anolis. Journal of the Department of Agriculture of Porto Rico, 15(3), 219-222.
Mayer, G. (1989). Chapter 2: Variation and distribution of Anolis roosevelti Grant, with comments on Puerto Rican Bank herpetogeography. In: Deterministic patterns of community structure in West Indian reptiles and amphibians. Harvard University PhD Thesis.