x 2, we grew up watching Les Hiddin, Alby Mangle, Malcom Douglas, Leyland brothers and of course the barefoot bushman Harry Butler.
Such a shame, he had done great things as a naturalist.
Old Bear Grylls has nothing on these guys regardless of how much urine he drink in one sitting.
You bring back heaps of dead specimens of something thought to be 'extinct'.....sounds pretty sensible to me :shock:
If you read my post properly Fay, it will make sense. He collected the frogs BEFORE they became extinct. His unnecessary and over the top collecting most probably contributed to the SUBSEQUENT extinction of the species. It wasn't thought to be extinct at the time of his collections.
Whole-specimen collecting still does occur in Australian museums but is much more conservative than in the past. While DNA samples are frequently collected by non-lethal methods, collecting specimens is important for many reasons: analysis of diet through stomach contents, studies of morphological adaptations, and taxonomy studies including new species determination, to name a few. I often see the complaint of new species being based too heavily on genetic differences. That's a whole other discussion, but I want to make the point that having whole specimens in museum collections is incredibly valuable in the description of new species when it comes to the morphological aspects.
I'm really not trying to put anyone down here or anything, just I know that museum specimen collecting is often misunderstood and viewed negatively in the public eye and it's a discussion I always want to contribute to. Museum collectors certainly never cause the extinction of a species. If collecting specimens for Australian museums coincided with a species extinction, that species was already not viable. I know wildlife is already under enough pressure from so many different sources, and that people are rightfully concerned by that. But specimen collecting, for the few individuals it removes (at least in modern times), is so worthwhile and important for our understanding and conservation of Australian wildlife.
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