Returning a 170-year-old preserved lizard to Jamaica is a step toward redressing colonial harms
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星期一, 六月 3, 2024
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In April 2024, scientists from the Natural History Museum of Jamaica and The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus accepted a very rare and historic specimen: a 16-inch lizard called the Jamaican giant galliwasp (Celestus occiduus).
Key Points:
- In April 2024, scientists from the Natural History Museum of Jamaica and The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus accepted a very rare and historic specimen: a 16-inch lizard called the Jamaican giant galliwasp (Celestus occiduus).
- Why would a preserved lizard, some 170 years old, evoke such excitement?
- Scientists in Jamaica, who have never seen or handled one of these lizards, are elated to have one to study.
Gathering specimens worldwide
- Many objects they brought back, as well as items formally archived through natural history expeditions, are housed today in European libraries and museums.
- In recent decades, museums have begun to repatriate some objects to their places of origin.
- Exploration and collecting specimens often relied on the knowledge and labor of enslaved persons who acted as field assistants and guides – but the historical record has little to say about their roles.
Species loss in Jamaica
- His collections include more than 1,500 plant specimens from Jamaica, which he acquired there from 1687 to 1689.
- After England gained formal possession of Jamaica in 1670, it established monoculture production of sugarcane across the island.
- Colonizers also introduced harmful species, such as the Indian gray mongoose ( H. edwardsii), which was brought to Jamaica to prey on rats in plantation sugarcane fields.
- The Indian grey mongoose quickly became a major threat to numerous species, including the Jamaican giant galliwasp.
Repairing an island’s ecology
- These papers were unpublished notes and illustrations by a naturalist who died in Jamaica in 1768 after some 20 years of observing and collecting flora and fauna.
- These photographs can aid the study of natural landscape or rural land cover changes due to agricultural expansion or abandonment.
- Returning specimens, artifacts and other materials is an important way to show respect for the societies and cultures that produced them.
- Rather than sitting in storage, Celeste has returned to Jamaica to be a centerpiece in the story of Jamaican environmental history.