I was curious what the oldest record is on iNat …. not the oldest by date of observation but the first to be submitted. This one might be it, number 30 from March 2008: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30
My personal first was this shrew posted in May 2013: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/273300
I wasn’t paying attention when iNat launched in 2008. Was anyone here, other than staff, during that first year?
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2
Observation 2 is here. Observation 1 doesn’t exist.
Was observation 1 deleted or left intentionally unoccupied? I don’t know that.
1 was a test observation deleted to my knowledge. It then skips from 2 to 27.
A number of the early records don’t exist and were presumably deleted as test submissions I suspect.
So, yeah, number 2 is the first.
Would be interesting to know who, other than staff, was there at the start and is still active.
Clinton Duffy(clinton) has been here since May 2008. To my knowledge he is one of the first(if not the first) non-staff member to be an active member.
and still active for marine life in the Southern hemisphere. Thank you for IDs.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?order_by=created_at&order=asc
Interesting, some of these predate the March 2008 submissions (submitted as early as 2007) but have a higher submission number. Maybe early tests of the site?
more likely cases where records were imported from another system that merged into iNat or were ported into iNat after going defunct. it looks like there’s some discusson about this in one of the older records: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/924211
Yes, wasn’t aware of the New Zealand database that got incorporated way back then. Interesting history if one reads the comments for these early records.
I like that the first (OK, second) observation added to iNat reflects the captive/cultivated/wild dilemma that we still struggle with repeatedly today.
Notes
Growing in our office. Maybe this doesn’t count since it’s captive…
So I’m gathering first observation could mean
-Observation #1 in the database
-The observation with the lowest database number still in existence (#2)
-The verifiable observation uploaded the longest time ago, even though it was added to a platform other than iNat, because that platform folded into iNat
-The overall observation added the longest time ago, also on another platform originally, which would be this one:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/935303
Who knew there’d be so much ambiguity about which one is “first”.
Or the oldest observation, which I believe is this from Dec 31, 1806
I can see why this one is Casual, and not only because of lack of photo. It was submitted before it was observed. 
Presumably an artifact of time zones.
Some days you just go to bed knowing “I’m gonna see some New Zealand Silverweed tomorrow”. lol
Honestly though, that’s got to be quite a rare observation category, since iNat now won’t let you submit observations for future dates. I wonder if there’s a filter to find any more of these where the submission predates the observation.
Wow, the battle in the DQA section of that observation is intense. It’s not possible to create an observation with a date that far in the past any more, is it? I just tried and the dates were greyed out, presumably because there’s no way I was alive then. Did this used to be different?
I have no idea. I just read through this thread and wondered what is the furthest in the past someone had created an observation.
There also seems to be one from 1768:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/47247203
And a bunch of glitched observations that show up as being from the year 2 CE, like this one:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/41219259
Now this whole thread has me curious about how these observations got created, since iNat at least currently doesn’t seem to support entering dates before 1900 (or some similar cutoff for which no current user could reasonably be expected to have been alive).
Remarkably good photo quality for the year 2. Especially since humans only arrived in New Zealand around 1250 AD. Neat observation!