The Lost Species: Great Expeditions in the Collections of Natural History Museums

The tiny, lungless Thorius salamander from southern Mexico, thinner than a match and smaller than a quarter.The lushly white-coated Saki, an arboreal monkey from the Brazilian rainforests.The olinguito, a native of the Andes, which looks part mongoose, part teddy bear.These fantastic species are all new to science--at least newly named and identified; but they weren't discovered in the wild, instead, they were unearthed in the drawers and cavernous basements of natural history museums.As Christopher Kemp reveals in The Lost Species, hiding in the cabinets and storage units of natural history museums is a treasure trove of discovery waiting to happen. With Kemp as our guide, we go spelunking into museum basements, dig through specimen trays, and inspect the drawers and jars of collections, scientific detectives on the hunt for new species.We discover king crabs from 1906, unidentified tarantulas, mislabeled Himalayan landsnails, an unknown rove beetle originally collected by Darwin, and