About 50% of natural history specimens may be being mistakenly named

Up to 50% of natural historical specimens stored in museums around the world may be misquoted.

Half of the world's natural history specimens were misbranded

In a statement on Nov. 16, Oxford expert Robert Scotland on Oxford University's crop science said that many areas of biological science, including academic research on evolution and conservation, were highly dependent on determining the exact name of the species. Without this accuracy, the global data set will no longer be meaningful due to the loss of connectivity to external reality.

The Scottish team studied 4,500 specimens of the African Aframomum genus of the ginger family. A detailed monograph study of this variety was completed in 2014, providing a highly accurate set of records for all species of this breed and the specimens currently stored in the world.

According to the research team, before having this set of records, at least 58% of the specimens of this variety were either misidentified, inaccurate or obsolete, or only identified as the ginger family. Since only a few varieties have been studied in the monograph so far, scientists believe there are still a large number of specimens that are still suffering from this confusion.

Illustration.(Source: biotik.org).

In addition, the team also found a number of cases with the same name but different names of plants in different museums. Analysis of 21,075 specimens of the Dipterocarpaceae , a family of Asian tropical forests, showed that up to 29% of the samples fell into this situation.

The same error is found in the online data system. Scientists scanned data from Ipomoea - a large and diverse family of plants including sweet potatoes - in the Global Biodiversity Information Base database. Test results of 49,500 specimens from the Americas show that 40% still use obsolete old names instead of updating new names, 16% with false and meaningless names. Even 11% of the samples do not have a name and only identify them.

According to experts, there are 3 main reasons for this situation.First , the academic community has not had enough time to conduct detailed monograph studies for each species. Secondly , the number of global specimens is increasing with the speed of research difficult to keep up, 50% of the statistical specimens in 2000 were collected after 1969.

And finally , there are too many museums and plant storage rooms that make it difficult for experts to cover all specimens.

Zoe Goodwin, an author who participated in the study published in the American journal Current Biology, believes that up to 50% of current natural history samples are being mistakenly labeled.