Hello I'm Dr. Katriina Ilves. I'm a research scientist in Ichthyology in the Zoology section of the Canadian Museum of Nature.
We're sitting here in the Large Vertebrate Wet Lab.
It's a preparation lab that we use to identify specimens, prepare them for final deposition into our collection, take photographs and work on our specimens.
My research here at the museum involves using the specimens in our collection, as well as those from other museum collections,
to study fish evolution—and evolution of biodiversity in particular.
In order to study biodiversity, you need to focus on one of the fundamental units of biodiversity, which is the species. If you are watching,
listening to and understanding this video, that makes you a member of the species Homo sapiens.
And what you may have noticed is that there are actually two Latinized words in that species name: the genus and the species.
This is an example of a lamprey. This is one of the earliest fishes on the fish family tree. It has a cartilaginous skeleton, and also, it doesn't have a jaw.
In place of its jaw, it has this oral disk. If you look closely, it is full of very spiny, sharp teeth.
This particular lamprey is parasitic and it uses these sharp teeth and the sucker-like disk
to attach to the side of an unlucky fish prey, usually a salmon of some kind.
Now this fish was named Lampetra macrostoma—macrostoma means "large mouth".
If you look closely, you can see that it does have a very large mouth;
this is, of course, relative to other members of the genus that it is related to.
So this is a specimen that was collected in 1965 by Dr. Ian Efford from the University of British Columbia,
as part of a Canadian expedition of scientists and medical doctors to Easter Island.
One of the specimens that was collected on this expedition is sitting right here, in our national collection.
This was a specimen that was sent by Dr. Efford to another fish scientist at the University of Miami who is a renowned expert in marine fishes: Dr. Dick Robins.
He identified it as something very interesting. He was able to determine that it is a cusk-eel in the genus Ophidian.
Ophidian actually means "snake-like" in ancient Greek.
He realized that it was something slightly different. So it wasn't like any other Ophidian that we knew about.
So he knew it was something that needed a new name.
There are some rules that have been designated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature on how we name the species name.
But it's really up to the scientist who found the species. So this is a species that was found on Easter Island, which is very isolated.
It's over 3500 km away from the coast of Chile. And so Dr. Robins decided that an appropriate name for this rare
and isolated species would be Offidion exul. Because exul is Latin for "exile".
This specimen is particularly important because this is the specimen that is linked to the new name.
We call that the holotype. It's very important for science and for natural-history collections,
because this is the specimen that future scientists would go back to if they were going
to do any further work on the genus or to identify new species.
We have over 700 000 fish specimens in our collection here at the Canadian Museum of Nature, including over 30 holotypes.
And there are at least as many stories.