Entertaining Read On The History Of The British Museum Of Natural History

Richard Fortey is the author of a string of richly informative and entertaining books on the history of life on earth, including Life: An Unauthorised Biography. A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (1997), Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution (2000), and Earth: An Intimate History (2004). More recently, Fortey turned his focus on the somewhat more recent history of the British Museum of Natural History, where he’s worked at for decades as a paleontologist. In Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum (2010), Fortey provides a personal account of the evolution of one of the greatest natural history museums in the world.

Although his notes on reptiles are brief, and mention of Anolis is entirely lacking, other interesting stories abound, including a number of interesting tales about the work by British Museum scientists on other adaptive radiations like African rift lake cichlids. Systematists will likely be particularly interested in Fortey’s accounting of how taxonomic and phylogenetic practices have evolved over his time at the museum. Fortey is an old school taxonomist who devotes attention in his latter chapters to changes in systematic practices over time, for better and worse. The days when at least one of the taxonomic experts at the museum maintained a lifetime appointment without a single publication are now long past, as attention has shifted to productivity and molecular inference. Of course, these new demands for productivity come coupled with new pressure to obtain funds, and, in many cases the abandonment of previously treasured practices, including the ability of specialists to spend decades becoming intimately familiar with a particular group of organisms. Although the emergence of the pipette-wielding, lab-coat wearing museum systematist won’t come as a surprise to readers of Anole Annals, Fortey’s personal accounting of this transition is among the more engaging accounts of this transition. Fortey’s book is a great addition to any systematist’s summer reading list. You better get to it quickly because he’s already published another new book on living fossils: Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind.