First Known Photographs of Living Specimens

To my great surprise, I just realised it's been more than two and a half years since I last wrote a journal post for this project! Very lax of me, and apologies to all for the lack of more regular updates.

The project has been surging along, and we now have more than 7,000 observations, which is fantastic to see. We also recently surpassed 2,000 project members, thanks in part to some regular mentions of the project in recent iNat blog posts (eg observation of the week).

So for all the newer members, I'll run through the project rules again:

1 . Any observations you add must be the first photograph(s) of that species anywhere. If an observation is the first one for that species to be uploaded to iNat, but other photos of that species from an earlier point in time already exist anywhere elsewhere online/in print, then that observation should not be added to the project. This is the biggest source of observations that I have to remove from the project. So your observation must be both the first photograph of that species on iNat and also the first anywhere.

If you encounter an observation of a species that is older than one already in the project, add it, but please message me so I can remove the one that no longer qualifies as oldest.

2 . Your photograph must be of a living individual. A number of observations have been added that depict things like empty mollusc shells, dead fishes, pinned insects, etc. Whilst these are of course valuable observations, they are not eligible for the project.

3 . If the male and female of a species are sexually dimorphic, then both are valid to be added to the project. So too if a species has distinct life stages (eg caterpillar/chrysalis/butterfly), they are all valid to be separately added to the project (assuming the other rules apply). Ditto for plants; if one observation shows the first ever photos of flowers, and another the first ever of fruits, they are both ok to add to the project. Please make sure, however, that the first two rules are also followed in these cases.

The project is very much self-sustaining now, with users adding observations to it every day, and there are a number of users in particular who have added many IDs and/or added records to the project, so huge thanks to everyone involved. I'd like to especially highlight the recent efforts of @borisb, who has contributed tremendously (IDing and adding) in the world of beetles and has been a very vocal advocate for the project, letting users know each time he adds one of their observations. menos ↑