14 DAY TRIAL // If you think you're having trouble getting people (and by people I mean your boss or your crush) to notice you, imagine having to wait for a century hidden in some box in a museum before finally getting the recognition you deserve. Yes, this can happen. Especially if you are a cricket.
Joking aside, a recent paper in the journal ZooKeys tells the tale of how, after lying in waiting for about 100 years at a Museum of Natural History in Europe, a cricket was finally identified as a previously undocumented species and described by science.
The bush cricket, featured in the image below, now goes by the name of Arostratum oblitum. As explained by Science Daily, entomologists settled on this moniker because “oblitum” is Latin for “forgotten,” and well, the insect was forgotten in the museum for quite a long while.
What's interesting is that, apart from Arostratum oblitum, specialists now having a close look at museum collections across Europe have so far documented another three bush cricket species that, for some reason, went unnoticed for decades.
“My study demonstrates that we have missed many interesting taxa once collected and put in museum collections and then forgotten for a long time. Probably many other new species are waiting to be discovered,” said specialist Bruno Massa with the University of Palermo in Italy.
