How Century-old Specimens Reveal New Birds

Andrés Cuervo is coming to the Museum of Art Theater on Monday, November 16, for a seminar on how century-old bird specimens are still revealing new species. Cuervo is the director of Colombia's National Bird Collection, and the talk is hosted by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The whole thing starts with a trip back to the 1910s, when a Carnegie Museum collector explored Colombia's Santa Marta mountains and shipped a huge number of specimens back to Pittsburgh. The curators at the time described many of them as species new to science, but not all were named right away. One owl, for instance, sat in the museum's cabinets for a full century before it was finally given a name in 2017.

Cuervo has spent time revisiting those same collecting sites in Colombia, and what he found is a bit unsettling: the birds there have changed in size and shape as the climate and landscapes have shifted around them. He uses that as a way to talk about why we need both old collections and new expeditions. The old collections help us find new species that were overlooked, and the new expeditions let us track how humans are actually changing the natural world in real time.

The seminar runs from 12 PM to 1 PM at the Museum of Art Theater, 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15217, and it's also available online via Zoom if you can't make it in person. It's free, and you don't need museum admission to attend.