High-quality casts of the missing holotype of Petalodus ohioensis Safford 1853 (Chondrichthyes, Petalodontidae) at the Field Museum of Natural History and their bearing on the validity and priority of the species

The validity of the chondrichthyan species Petalodus ohioensis Safford 1853, has long been in doubt due to the poor quality of the published figures and the unknown whereabouts of the holotype. That situation changed with the discovery of casts of the holotype in the collections of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The quality of the casts is poor, but sufficient to establish P. ohioensis as a valid species and as a senior synonym of P. alleghaniensis Leidy 1856. Recently, casts of the holotype of much better quality were found in the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History, accompanied by documentation indicating that they were likely obtained directly from Safford by O.P. Hay in 1896. The Field Museum casts clearly show the bands of ridges at the base of the crown on the labial and lingual sides, which are not visible on the Yale Peabody Museum casts.

Curating Digital Surrogates in a Museum Archives: The Historic Boards Collection at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University

This work uses a case study to examine the practice of digital curation in a museum archives, with a focus on convergence between museum and archival methods for providing online access to individual items as well as to collections. The case study focuses on the recently digitized Historic Boards (or “H boards”) collection at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. This collection includes approximately 25,000 photographs depicting Harvard-led research expeditions beginning in the mid-1800s. By the early 1900s, museum staff had organized the photographs into groups and pasted them onto mat boards, with each board showing multiple views of a particular geographic location. As the H boards were created as a resource for educators and students, they provide a valuable source of documentation for both the museum's curatorial history and the pioneering work of Harvard ethnographers. With digital surrogates now accessible through the museum's Collections Online portal, the H boards project offers detailed examples of how the evidence contained in archival photographs and accompanying text-based records can be more sharply focused or, alternately, obscured, by the decisions made in constructing and displaying digital surrogates online. More generally, the H board project offers insights on how archives and museums may benefit from treating digital curation as an iterative practice shaped by an ever-shifting technology landscape, by the resource constraints faced by many repositories, and, ultimately, by the historic opportunities afforded by making archives visible in digital form.

A Harvard Physician’s Reports on an 1857 Visit to the Saamaka

In 1857, Harvard professor and anatomist Jeffries Wyman traveled to Suriname to collect specimens for his museum at Harvard (later the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, founded in 1866 and curated by Wyman). Though his main interest concerned amphibians, he had a secondary interest in ethnology and, apparently, a desire to demonstrate current theories of racial “degeneration” among the African-descended population, particularly the “Bush Negroes.” This research note presents a letter he wrote his sister from Suriname, excerpts from his field diary, and sketches he made while visiting the Saamaka and Saa Kiiki Ndyuka. Wyman’s brief account of his visit suggests that Saamakas’ attitudes toward outside visitors (whether scientists, missionaries, or government officials) remained remarkable stable, from the time of the 1762 peace treaty until the Suriname civil war of the 1980s.