Sherborn's foraminiferal studies and their influence on the collections at the Natural History Museum, London

The odd couple of protistology: Edward Heron-Allen (1861-1943) and Arthur Earland (1866-1958)

Edward Heron-Allen and Arthur Earland were among the last great amateur foraminifera researchers. Their partnership began in 1907 and ended in 1932. While close in age to one another, they shared little more than a fascination for forams and a lack of any university training. In most other aspects, the two men were completely different. Heron-Allen was a famous upper class polymath, expert not only on forams, but also on the Persian language, violins, palm reading, history, asparagus, and barnacles. He was also an accomplished novelist and poet, who frequented literary circles. In contrast to the flamboyant Heron-Allen, Earland was a discrete civil servant who admitted to working on forams as a relief from the monotony of his job. Hence, the two were improbable partners. However, together they produced 39 substantial works on forams. Their studies concerned assemblages from Southern Ocean to the North Sea and they are today credited with the original description of 186 species. Here the distinct lives of the two men are presented, and their contributions to protistology, as partners as well as individuals, are reviewed. The case is made for considering Earland's work as neglected relative to that of Heron-Allen, except perhaps by foram taxonomists.

A magpie with a card-index mind - Charles Davies Sherborn 1861-1942

Charles Davies Sherborn was geologist, indexer and bibliographer extraordinaire. He was fascinated by science from an early age and like so many Victorians, the young Sherborn was a passionate natural history collector and was obsessed with expanding his collection of land and freshwater shells. He later described himself as being a ‘thorough magpie’ and having ‘a card-index mind’, and these two traits coalesced in his monumental Index Animalium, the compilation of which occupied 43 years of his life. One of the first visitors through the doors of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington when it opened in 1881, Sherborn began work there seven years later as one of the small band of unofficial scientific workers, paid by the number of fossils he prepared. By the time of his death in 1942, Sherborn’s corner in the Museum was the first port of call for generations of scientists seeking advice, information – or an invitation to one of his famous ‘smoke and chat’ parties.

In addition to his work on the Index, Sherborn is also responsible for rescuing from damp and probable destruction the huge archive of Sir Richard Owen, the great comparative anatomist and the prime mover behind the creation of the Natural History Museum, London. Without Sherborn, this invaluable resource of correspondence, manuscripts and books may well have been irretrievably ruined.

'Where is the damned collection?' Charles Davies Sherborn's listing of named natural science collections and its successors

C. D. Sherborn published in 1940, under the imprint of Cambridge University Press but at his own expense, Where is the - Collection? This idiosyncratic listing of named natural science collections, and their fates, was useful, but incomplete, and uneven in its accuracy. It is argued that those defects were inevitable, given Sherborn's age and wartime conditions, and that what might seem one of Sherborn's less impressive works was in fact a pioneering work highly influential in stimulating the production of successor works now much used in curation, and in systematic and descriptive biology and palaeontology. The book also contributed to the development of collections research in the natural sciences, and the history of collections and of museums.

A common registration-to-publication automated pipeline for nomenclatural acts for higher plants (International Plant Names Index, IPNI), fungi (Index Fungorum, MycoBank) and animals (ZooBank)

Collaborative effort among four lead indexes of taxon names and nomenclatural acts (International Plant Name Index (IPNI), Index Fungorum, MycoBank and ZooBank) and the journals PhytoKeys, MycoKeys and ZooKeys to create an automated, pre-publication, registration workflow, based on a server-to-server, XML request/response model. The registration model for ZooBank uses the TaxPub schema, which is an extension to the Journal Tag Publishing Suite (JATS) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The indexing or registration model of IPNI and Index Fungorum will use the Taxonomic Concept Transfer Schema (TCS) as a basic standard for the workflow. Other journals and publishers who intend to implement automated, pre-publication, registration of taxon names and nomenclatural acts can also use the open sample XML formats and links to schemas and relevant information published in the paper.