Type-Specimens of Birds in the British Museum (Natural History) Vol. 1 NON-PASSERINES RACHEL L. M. WARREN TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY) LONDON : 1966 Price £4 Publication No. 651 TYPE-SPECIMENS OF BIRDS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY) Vol. 1 NON-PASSERINES RACHEL L. M. WARREN TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY) LONDON : 1966 © Trustees of the British Museum (Natural History) 1966 Printed by Eyre and Spottiswoode Limited at Grosvenor Press Portsmouth : INTRODUCTION Scope and Presentation Tffls volume lists the non-passerine birds which have been segregated, from the general collections of the Department of Zoology, as name-bearing type-specimens. Thus only holotypes, syntypes, lectotypes and neotypes are eligible for inclusion. These categories are defined by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN 1964, Ch. XVI). Although all members of a syntype series have equal status, only one member of each has been segregated and listed. Wherever possible the specimen selected is the one which has been regarded as the holotype, because of a manuscript indication or a subsequent publication. Listing of a syntype as "the type", as was often done in the Catalogue of Birds (BM 1874-1898), does not constitute its designation as lectotype; nor of course does its listing in the present work. Where "male and female types" were originally designated all the members of the series are regarded as syntypes, but one of the designated specimens is segregated. Specimens which have been wrongly recorded in the literature as types, and types which cannot now be found, are listed in their proper places with explanatory notes. These entries are distinguished from those relating to type-specimens by being entered under names in Roman instead of in boldface print. Since this is a purely typological work, no attempt is made to assign the listed types to currently-accepted taxa. This allows them to be arranged in alphabetical order, with the omission of a separate index, and gives the arrangement permanent validity. Any worker interested in the types per- taining to a taxon (rather than in the type bearing a particular name) there- fore needs a list of the species-group names concerned before consulting this work. However, the orders or suborders in which the types are currently placed (according to Peters 1931-1948) are indicated by means of the following key numbers, in the right-hand margins 1. iv Introduction Each entry takes the following form. The species-group name, printed in boldface, is followed by the original combination, its author and date, and the key number. Names bearing marks now prohibited are corrected (ICZN 1964, Art. 32c (i) in both the name and the combination. Next are given the original reference; the category of the type; its sex and maturity, with additions to and emendations of the original statement added in paren- theses; its nature, if not originally a study-skin and now in complete condition; its Museum register number; its locality and date of collection, with additions to and emendations of the original statement added in parentheses; any known subsequent restriction of type-locality, with reference; its field collector; and the source from which it came to the Museum. If it is a syntype, the known whereabouts of other syntypes are mentioned; and any further facts are recorded. Recognition and Segregation The earliest reference to type-specimens of birds in the British Museum seems to be by J. E. Gray (1844). This lists various collections presented to the Museum, and mentions certain specimens as types: some from the Hudson's Bay Company as the types of species described by Richardson (1831), and some collected on the Niger by J. W. R. Thompson as the types of species described by Jardine. The register of specimens for 1855, when more than four hundred birds were purchased from the Zoological Society of London on the sale of their Museum, notes a number of speci- mens as types, including those described by Gould (1841) from Darwin's voyage in H.M.S. Beagle, and others by Eraser and Vigors. The practice of designating type-specimens developed gradually, and authors differed very much in their concern for it. Some specimens in the collection are labelled as "types", which were collected after the original descriptions were published. The segregation of type-specimens was begun before 1938. In early 1939, the Trustees of the British Museum gave instructions that all type and other important specimens were to be segregated, so that they could be removed to places of safety in case of war. The work was undertaken so vigorously by the staff of the Bird Section and by two visitors, Dr. C. E. Hellmayr and Mr. A. J. Van Rossem, that by the declaration of war in September, 85 per cent of the type-specimens were packed for removal to the Zoological Museum, Tring. At the end of the war a more complete and accurate catalogue was en- visaged. Miss P. M. Thomas, who was stationed at Tring, was asked to begin the preparation of a loose-leaf catalogue, and had finished several groups before the types were returned to London in 1947. At that time the continuation of this work was handed on to me. The status of the specimens was more critically studied, and further types were recognised in the general collection from a study of the literature. On the publication Introduction v of the volume on passerine type-specimens the work will be completed. It was when the loose-leaf catalogue was finished that the Bird Section staff helped increasingly with bringing the entries into their final form. Thus, type-specimens for segregation have been discovered both by investigating the status of all specimens in the collection which are labelled as types or with some equivalent term, and by searching the most likely literature. However, names based on specimens in the collection, whose authors have not drawn attention to the fact, may well have been overlooked. Two of the most important sources of information on acquisitions to the Museum collections are Sharpens contribution to the History of the Collections (1906) and his presidential address to the Fourth International Ornithological Congress, 1905 (1907). The latter ends: "In the record which I present to the Congress it will be seen that nearly every private collection in England has passed with the willing consent of the owners into the British Museum, while the donations of the great collections of Mr. Allan Hume, Mr. Osbert Salvin, Mr. Henry Seebohm, Mr. Philip Crowley [eggs], and other celebrated naturalists, have contributed to the renown of the British Museum." To this short list of the most important collections may be added Dr. Sharpens own, and those of the Hon. East India Company (with Sykes', Horsfield's and many of Hodgson's speci- mens), A. R. Wallace, John Gould, Capt. G. E. Shelley and P. L. Sclater. In the sixty years since the History of the Collections, types have been described and presented by numerous authors. Several collections which contain numbers of types are those of: Boyd Alexander, G. L. Bates, H. Gumey (birds of prey, presented by the Norwich Museum), H. H. Haring- ton, E. J. Johnstone, G. Loddiges, H. Lynes, E. McConnell, R. Meinertz- hagen, H. Philby, Lord Rothschild (ratites), W. Serle (part), J. Vincent, H. Whistler and J. Whitaker; and those made in New Guinea, Indo-China and the Comoro Islands by British Ornithologists' Union expeditions, and many types presented by the Raffles Museum, Singapore (Gibson-Hill 1949). Notes on some Authors and Collections While Sharpe's accounts give much valuable information, not repeated here, a few additional notes should be useful. John Co///a'( 1804 -1881) Gould's famous collection of hummingbirds was acquired in 1881, many of them still mounted in the glass cases which had been displayed the Crystal m Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Gould rarely desig- nated a holotype, and the syntypes of his species have mainly been selected from his study-skins, many of which are labelled in his own handwriting. References to particular specimens are often given in his Monograph (1860-1880), after the publication of the original descriptions, but there is still some doubt about the status of some of the supposed type-specimens. vi Introduction The Museum acquired much of the rest of Gould's collection between 1837 and 1881, but his Australian collection was sold to the Academy of Sciences, Philadelphia, in 1847 (Schauensee 1957), and there are syntypes of some species in both museums. B. H. Hodgson (1800-1894) Hodgson lived from 1821 until 1843 at Katmandu in Nepal, and from then until 1859 at Darjeeling. He was a prolific collector, who described over 150 nominal species of birds, and made drawings of them. One set of these drawings is in the Museum, and another is in the library of the Zoo- logical Society of London. The specimens referred to in Hodgson's Cata- logue of Nepalese birds (1844) were acquired by the Museum in 1843, and other early specimens were in the museum of the Honourable East India Company, acquired between 1860 and 1880. Later collections received in 1845 and 1848 contained few types, and the localities of some of these were wrongly given as Behar. Hodgson's catalogue (1844) contained no descriptions, though the new names published in it are linked by numbers to his unpublished drawings and to his specimens. Although many of the original labels were destroyed by G. R. Gray, many of these early specimens in the Museum can be identified as those from which descriptions were made at a later date, and several of these are indicated in the Catalogue of Birds as the types of Hodgson's names.