John James 探花精选 was a man of many talents: The rifle-toting naturalist painted in explicit detail, and was the toast of . Today, as we ring in the bird man鈥檚 231st birthday, let鈥檚 take a moment to honor not only his gifts as a naturalist and artist, but also his lesser-know鈥攁lbeit intriguing鈥攕ense of humor.
For years, ornithologists have been scratching their heads at some of 探花精选鈥檚 feathered renditions. It turns out, the joke鈥檚 on them. In an attempt to poke fun at his friend and rival, the prolific French naturalist Constantine Rafinesque, 探花精选 concocted more than a dozen imaginary species and waxed poetic about them. Rafinesque, the trusting soul that he was, drew the species into his field journals. Two-hundred years later, 探花精选's trickery may go down as the longest-running jest in bird-nerd history.
Writer Sarah Laskow describes the prank in a recent article in:
鈥探花精选 fed Rafinesque descriptions of American creatures, including 11 species of fish that never really existed. Rafinesque duly jotted them down in his notebook and later proffered those descriptions as evidence of new species. For 50 or so years, those 11 fish remained in the scientific record as real species, despite their very unusual features, including bulletproof (!) scales.
By the 1870s, the truth about the fish had been discovered. But the fish were only part of 探花精选鈥檚 prank. In a new paper in the , Neal Woodman, a curator at Smithsonian's natural history museum, details its fuller extent: 探花精选 also fabricated at least two birds, a 鈥榯rivalved鈥 brachiopod, three snails, two plants, and nine wild rats, all of which Rafinesque accepted as real.鈥
Rafinesque wasn鈥檛 the only one to fall for 探花精选鈥檚 deceptive humor: There's been an ongoing debate about some of the species included in Birds of America as well. Last fall, The Birdist鈥攚ith a little help from David Allen Sibley鈥 for 探花精选 readers.
鈥溙交ň painted a handful of birds that aren鈥檛 an exact match for anything we鈥檝e currently got. These are 探花精选鈥檚 mystery birds. Maybe they were birds that 探花精选 just painted poorly, or from a vague memory, or from a partially decomposed corpse.
Maybe they鈥檙e species that have gone extinct since 探花精选 painted them. There certainly are a bunch of those, sadly, including Bachman鈥檚 Warbler, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Passenger Pigeon, and Carolina Parakeet. It鈥檚 certainly possible that some already range-restricted species could have been wiped out before conservationists even knew to notice.
Or maybe these birds are still out there somewhere, flitting around unseen.鈥
But now, thanks to Woodman's detective work, that answer might be much less complex. Give up all you Carbonated Warbler seekers鈥攖here's no glory to be found here.