His first great specimen-gathering expedition - to the Amazon - ended in disaster when the ship returning him to Britain caught fire and sank, taking with it thousands of specimens and his hopes of an assured income.
Most of his expeditions took him to Yunnan province, in China -- a harsh and brutal China -- where he died at 58 after long years of flat-out adventure and prodigious specimen-gathering, in 1932.
But on several specimen-gathering expeditions, Rubinoff saw species he had thought were terrestrial living in the middle of streams.
Since no convalescent-phase serum specimens were collected from those patients, we do not know the negative results are truly negative or just resulted from the timing of gathering specimens when no antibodies were produced.
We left our specimens behind in the gathering dusk.
Although Ynés Mexía didn't receive formal training in botany, she distinguished herself as a premier collector, gathering approximately 150,000 specimens including a new genus and several new species.
After 4 years gathering live footage and visiting specimens in museums, the researchers classified birds around the planet by assigning scores across five characteristics: measurements, songs, plumage, behaviors, and geographical relationships with one another.
Concerned about the Smithsonian's reputation as "the nation's attic," which suggested that most of its 137 million specimens and objects were mostly hidden away gathering dust, Clough conducted vigorous outreach.
So the researchers expanded their analysis, spending the next decade gathering tissue from museum and live specimens representing 50 of the 51 genera.
"I was really surprised because I thought the Darwin collection had been pretty well studied," says Chatzimanolis. Don't be put off if the specimens you encounter in the museum have been gathering dust for decades.
