Half of world's natural history specimens likely "wrongly named": study

As many as 50 percent of all natural history specimens held in the world's museums could be wrongly named, said a study published Monday.

"Many areas in the biological sciences, including academic studies of evolution and applied conservation ... are underpinned by accurate naming," lead author Robert Scotland of the Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford University said in a statement.

"Without accurate names on specimens, the records held in collections around the world would make no sense, as they don't correspond to the reality outside."

Scotland and colleagues studied 4,500 specimens of the African ginger genus Aframomum, on which a detailed monographic study was completed in 2014, providing an accurate account of all the species and their specimens.

The team were surprised to find that prior to this monograph at least 58 percent of specimens were either misidentified, given an outdated or redundant name, or only identified to the genus or family.

As few plant groups have been recently monographed, the team suggested that a similar percentage of wrong names might be expected in many other groups.

The researchers also found specimens from the same plant might often be given different names in different museums. An analysis of 21,075 specimens of the Dipterocarpaceae, a family of rainforest trees from Asia, the team found 29 percent had different names in different herbaria.

Mistakes were also contained within aggregated records stored online. The team scoured the records of Ipomoea -- a large and diverse genus which includes the sweet potato -- on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility database.

Examining the names found on 49,500 specimens from the Americas, they found that 40 percent of these were outdated synonyms rather than the current name, and 16 percent of the names were unrecognizable or invalid. In addition, 11 percent of the specimens weren't identified, being given only the name of the genus.

Three reasons were attributed to these inaccurate names.

First, they suggested that there simply isn't enough time or research devoted to writing monographs.

Second, they pointed out that the number of specimens in the world is increasing too quickly for research to keep up -- with 50 percent of the world's specimens in 2000 having been collected since 1969.

And finally, there are now so many museums and herbaria around the world that experts cannot view all the specimens in a genus and revise the names accordingly.

While Scotland and his team have shown that the names of flowering plants are commonly incorrect, other researchers have shown that the insect kingdom is potentially in an even worse situation.

Of 1.8 million different described species on Earth, 0.35 million are flowering plants and a further 0.95 million are insects, according to the study.

"We think a conservative estimate is that up to half the world's natural history specimens could be incorrectly named,' said Zoe Goodwin, the first author of the paper.

The findings were published in the U.S. journal Current Biology. Endite