When you walk into a natural history museum, you get the impression you’ve entered a sacred space of learning and preservation. Artifacts, plants, animals—all carefully studied by specialists and accurately detailed to communicate their importance to visitors. But unfortunately, museums aren’t as reliable as you might think. Museums are riddled with problems: mislabeled items, inaccurately identified creatures and a plethora of unstudied material, some of it found over 100 years later or never at all.
On November 16, Oxford University published a study in Current Biology saying that half of all specimens in natural history museums are mislabeled. The problem isn’t contained to one museum, though. As museums often digitize their data, this inaccurate information is disseminated around the world and integrated into other collections.
Scientists came to their conclusion after they examined 4,500 specimens of African ginger that had been the subject of an another in-depth 2014 study. They found that prior to the study, 58 percent of specimen had been inaccurately identified. They then decided to check how accurately museums identify plants they receive and found that multiple museums will often mislabel the same plant. Then they turned their attention to gauge the accuracy of online databases. They researched the plant genus Ipomoea, the family sweet potatoes belong to, and realized that out of nearly 50,000 plants, 40 percent were identified by an older synonym instead of the plant’s current name, 16 percent of the names were either unrecognizable or invalid and 11 percent weren’t even fully categorized—they just had the name of the genus but not of the species. And that’s just research conducted on one genus out of the millions we’ve collected.
And that’s just the start of it.
Remember the Brontosaurus? Yeah, what we thought for so long was a dinosaur actually never existed. Because of a famous feud between two scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we believed the Brontosaurus was a dinosaur, when in reality it was another dinosaur, the Apatosaurus, topped with the wrong head. It started when paleontologist O.C. Marsh put the head of one dinosaur onto the body of another dinosaur he’d found and called it the Apatosaurus so he could announce a new dinosaur find. A few years later, his team found what they thought was a brand new dinosaur, but in reality was just a fully intact Apatosaurus. To cover his tracks, Marsh agreed it was a new dinosaur, calling it the Brontosaurus. The mislabeled and misassembled dinosaur stayed in The Carnegie Museum until the 1970s when two scientists decided to reexamine the skeleton and determined it had the wrong head. They replaced it with another skull that had been dug up in 1910, which they believed to be the Apatosaurus’s original head. So, for almost a century, the museum had an incorrectly assembled dinosaur on display while the actual head remained in storage somewhere.
Then there are the times when scientists discover a brand new animal in their own collection. That happened in 2013 when the Smithsonian announced they’d found the first new mammal in the Americas in over 30 years. However, the newly found olinguito wasn’t new at all. Olinguitos had been found and added to collections in various museums throughout the U.S. for the past 100 years, only they were mislabeled as olingo, another similar-looking animal. In other words, the “unknown” mammal had been hiding in plain sight the entire time.
Simply because of the inundation of materials found, it’s also not uncommon for museums to leave priceless discoveries unstudied for 100 years. For instance, though scientists have only one fully intact dodo bird, it took them a century to actually study it.
Expeditions to find new objects, animals and plants are incredibly important, but items already in museums are equally important. After all, it’s always a good thing to have items correctly labeled; plus, there’s no telling what surprises they’re likely to find.
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