Homage to a Dead Dipterist

Hands up if you've heard of Carl Linnaeus (I'm expecting lots of raised hands...)

And keep your hands up if you've heard of Charles Paul Alexander (not so many hands in the air now, I suspect...)

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) split the natural world into three Kingdoms - animal, plant and mineral. He then proceeded to devise and formalise binomial nomenclature, which is the accepted 'species naming system' that we still use today. He was the first person to officially 'describe' somewhere in the region of 4400 animal species and 7700 plant species, which he then placed into their respective Kingdoms and shuffled into some sort of a logical sequence. Quite simply, he was a brilliant man. In modern times, with our far greater understanding of family inter-relationships and various speciation processes, his Kingdoms and sequencing have undergone some fairly radical jiggling, but his system of binomial nomenclature has absolutely stood the test of time. Anybody who is into taxonomy will have heard of Carl Linneaus and he quite rightly earns the title as the father of taxonomy.

Earlier this evening I was perusing various websites to see if there was a common (ie colloquial) name for the Limonidae, when I stumbled across the name Charles Paul Alexander. I'd never heard of him before, chances are that you haven't either. So I went and Googled him. Charles P. Alexander (1889-1981) was an American entomologist and academic professor who specialised in diptera - particularly, it would seem, the craneflies. There's a Wikipedia stub about him here. 

What I find miraculous is that much (maybe even all) of his cranefly-related works are stored inside two secure boxes at the Smithsonian Institute down at Washington DC. This archived material runs from 1905 to 1979, the earliest being his boyhood notebooks written when he was aged sixteen, running all the way through to the scientific papers that he wrote aged 90, just a year before he died. That's an entire lifetime of notes, correspondences and papers dedicated to craneflies! And yet who amongst us had even heard of this guy before tonight? If you are interested, there's a link to his archived material here. 

Oh, and I probably ought to mention that he described somewhere over ELEVEN THOUSAND species of cranefly (of a currently known 15,000) as new to science. Eleven thousand!!!! I find that absolutely staggering, so staggering in fact, that I felt compelled to share the story of this great man here, lest he is forgotten or those two storeboxes thrown out with so much other 'useless junk'.  

The legacy of Linnaeus' classification system lives on to this day, but Charles P. Alexander should be duly recognised too, if 'only' for the fact that he devoted his entire adult life towards furthering the classification of craneflies. I had absolutely no idea that anybody, other than Linnaeus, had described that many species new to science. I find it humbling, yet at the same time utterly mind-boggling, that anybody could be so focussed on just one aspect of the natural world. Maybe that's because I'm a shallow, supercilious fool. Maybe it's because I'm just not passionate or driven enough to 'get it'. Or maybe it's simply because there are far too few Charles P. Alexanders out there nowadays to show us the way?