This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Scientists led by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History have restored the physical reference of one of the most historically significant names in biology. In a paper published in Taxonomy, researchers designated a new type specimen, or neotype, for Araneus angulatus, the first animal species described using binomial nomenclature, the two-part naming system that scientists use today to identify and classify living organisms.
The designation reconnects the name to a physical specimen decades after the original name-bearing spiders disappeared. The button-size spider Araneus angulatus was originally described in 1757 by Swedish arachnologist Carl Alexander Clerck. To support his description, Clerck preserved three A. angulatus spiders that served as "types," specimens that define what a species name refers to.
But sometime between 1858 and 1965, those scientifically invaluable specimens vanished. "That meant that the scientific name Araneus angulatus was suddenly unmoored from reality," said arachnologist Jonathan Coddington, an emeritus researcher and curator at the museum. "There was no specimen to show exactly what this name actually means." To restore that missing connection, Coddington and an international team examined newly collected A. angulatus specimens from Sweden near where Clerck is believed to have collected the original types.
After comparing the spiders to Clerck's descriptions and illustrations and confirming their identity through DNA analysis, the researchers designated one specimen as the new neotype, establishing an official physical reference for the species for the first time in at least six decades. The research began as a passion project for Coddington, who has described many new species of spiders over his 40-year career at the museum. It quickly turned into an international research effort that he found reminiscent of a historical thriller in the vein of the Da Vinci Code.
"This science spans centuries, involves major historical figures and culminates with a scientist going out to an island in the middle of the Baltic Sea to catch eight spiders," he said. The central figure in this historical saga is Clerck, who was a government official in Stockholm. In the 1730s, he became fascinated with taxonomy, the branch of science focused on classifying organisms, after attending a lecture by Carl Linnaeus, an eminent Swedish biologist who invented binomial nomenclature.
Before Linnaeus, species names were long amalgamations of descriptive words that often varied from place to place. Linnaeus aimed to standardize the naming process by using only a generic name to describe an organism's group, or genus, and a specific name to describe that organism's particular species within the genus. This convention created streamlined scientific names like Homo sapiens.
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