At NMNH, there was a lichen curator who made his specimen labels on a movable type printing press in his basement. Occasionally, he would forget to swap out the date or locality block, so I get to play the "which part of this label is wrong?" game and dig back into his field notebooks to fix it.

🌾!

Thanks for sharing this beautiful video. It has been much too long since I was up in Acadia for the fall colors!

Sadly, in this case the push to get rid of the herbarium is coming from other biologists who don't want systematics to be part of the department's mission any more. I think if DUKE was bigger they would be even more hostile.

For sure the greater tragedy is that closing the herbarium signals the end of plant/fungal biodiversity research at Duke. If you start there, the decision to close logically follows. I have two aims:

1) to make sure Duke is publicly shamed for its abandonment of basic science