A good paper. I was however interested in the assertion of the authors that this example suppports continued collecting. I thought it was actually rather a poor example of support for collecting to date, since so many have gone unnoticed in existing collections! The argument (which may be true in part) is "the old collectors / museum workers didn't do a very good job of recording data (eg soft parts colour) and identifying stuff, so we need to carry on and do it right this time".
cheers, alan
I don't think we were so down on earlier collectors/collections (assuming that's what you meant by 'to date.' Certainly, collections made since the 1960s are what made this discovery possible!) as you've suggested, but I guess your last sentence is somewhat along the lines of what we were saying.
The general gist is that with all the information taken with each modern specimen, its value to science can be considered higher than that of older individual specimens and not necessarily due to faults of those olde timey collectors. In many cases, the technology simply wasn't available for them to do what we can now... but that said, recording soft part colors, molt, fat, reproductive condition, stomach contents, skull ossification, presence/absence of a bursa, etc., would have been possible even then, and would have been very helpful. Furthermore, we wanted to make the point that general collecting is still important because you never know what, down the line, will be discovered and how specimens that had been collected by general collection (meaning, a broader array of taxa), rather than targeted specifically (e.g., by going to some remote location and only targeting a few taxa there), will be used to support such new discoveries--the present thrush being an excellent example. Having specimens from wide geographic and seasonal sampling is immensely important to show patterns that may not be noticed in the field or even in the hand, without the benefit of comparison to a series.
And contrary to our paper being "poor support for collecting to date", I'd say that the older specimens that we discovered sitting, unrecognized, in museums were very important to our story in allowing us to show that we weren't dealing with a few freak individuals, to map the species' distribution, and to allow us to muse on timing of breeding, at the least. To further illustrate the importance of the old specimens: search for photos of Turdus hauxwelli and T. sanchezorum (heck, almost ANY Neotropical Turdus!) online... You'll find *very* few (so far, I have only seen one of T. sanchezorum, on Wikiaves:
http://wikiaves.com/502564&t=s&s=11526. I know of a handful of others, but probably fewer than 5), even of true T. hauxwelli. Meanwhile, the specimens, even the oldest ones, are great documentation for the form now that we know how to identify it! That's the beauty of museum collections: you can always go back and refer to them if you have a question. Photos can never replace that.
In any event, thanks for your comment, it sounds like you agree with us.
Good birding!
Dan