Saturday, April 19, 2008

Ben Trumble, get your bag and snake hook. I've got the nets. We are going to look for new species.


1 comment:

B.E.Trumble said...

Wade, nice stuff. Wonderful collection, even if the Curator believes that the masses won't pay a buck to see it. The big African venomous herp exporter from the '30's through the early '60's was a colorful character named C.P.J.N. Ionides, a Brit expat outside Mombasa. Later Jonathan Leakey, son of Louis B Leakey shipped out of Kenya. In the 1920's the American Museum launched it's massive Asian collecting program that sent Roy Andrews to Mongolia after dinosaur bones. An offshoot of that expedition went in the opposite direction through China, Tibet, and into India. A herpetologist named Clifford Pope who later became a museum curator named dozens of new species on that field trip. Much as I like things that crawl, I believe one of the major benefits from the Asiatic expeditions was the close observation of the nearly extinct Mongolian Wild Horses (Przewalski's Horse.) Captive reproduction and a carefully managed studbook saved them, and today animals reintroduced into Mongolia have established healthy populations.

Ben