Hey everyone so another curator and I bumped into a disagreement on how the Recent Evidence of Organism tag should be used and it got me thinking. I was originally using it in a manner that would be akin to using it if the photograph was of food (specifically a french fry in this case), buildings, o…

my understanding was that the ‘recent evidence’ tag is there so that people can tag things like fossils, which do represent evience of an organism, but old enough that they aren’t a good fit for iNat maps and data pool (no you didn’t see a velociraptor in current day Utah etc). For things like food …

I would not consider that a photo of french fries is a good observation of the potato plant.

Related question, what would be the best approach to observations of taxidermied animals?

i’d mark them as captive. They are dead but if someone had brought a live animal to that location in a cage it wouldn’t be too different.

Generally with specimens, be they in a msueum, or fouling someone’s wall. if the date and location are where they are currently sitting - mark the date and location as inaccurate if the date and location seem to indicate where it was obtained - they are acceptable

[image] cmcheatle: if the date and location are where they are currently sitting - mark the date and location as inaccurate huh. i would have thought just mark them as not wild. I would only mark date/time wrong if it looks like someone mapped wrong. Maybe i am off though, i don’t know.

To me, something like this : https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20706244 The photograph itself is taken in a museum or collection or whatever, but the date and location reflect where it was collected. And it is a perfectly valid observation. Taxidermy stuff is just another type of specimen. …

hmm, yeah i see your point. I was imagining like, a natural history museum display or something. if it’s trackable to a date and time when sampled, that makes sense

For users that accidentally upload a fossil specimen on iNaturalist, I think it would be worth redirecting them to myFOSSIL , which is another citizen science data site that is actually for fossils.

Curators: Recent Evidence of Organism Issues

General

bouteloua March 29, 2019, 5:00pm 2

“Recent evidence of organism? No” refers to fossils primarily.

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Curators: Recent Evidence of Organism Issues

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