Back when I used to do interesting work at the Academy of Natural Sciences, my friend Earle Spamer once showed me an old wooden table.
“This,” he said, “is the table where Edward Drinker Cope was flensed.”
Now, Earle’s got a good sense of humor (by my standards, which are admittedly low) so I was never sure if this was a joke, objective truth, or Academy apocrypha. There is a rather large corpus of Academy apocrypha.
Earle’s written lots of excellent stuff, including a natural history of the Colorado River and an analysis of the probable cladistic connection between Barney the Dinosaur and a dead salmon. But recently I noticed the Earle’s 1999 paper Know Thyself: Responsible Science and the Lectotype of Homo sapiens Linnaeus 1758 (in which he totally schools Louie Psihoyos and Robert Bakker) has become the standard reference behind the ICZN’s official designation of Carl von Linne as the type specimen for homo sapiens sapiens.
I could write up the homo sap type controversy (and name-drop Academy colleagues Gary Rosenberg and Ted Daeschler, who I also remember fondly) but somebody else already did a better job. Well, except that the author repeats the syphillis canard against Cope, which appears to have been disproven at this point.
So it seems that Earle has reached a rather significant scientific stature, and the tables in several scientific publications will have to be revised.
Have you read Fortey’s Dry Store-Room Number One yet?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dry-Store-Room-No-Natural/dp/0007209886
Yes; it was excellent, in a somewhat dryly humorous way. I read it in the American edition, though.
Very strongly reminded me of the Academy; although the time it describes is past, you could still feel the presence of the eccentric natural scientists of yesterday while I was there.