What to do with plant matter found in a old book?

Hello! I recently found a book at a thrift store, the 1892 edition of “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman. Funnily enough, a leaf was inside one of the pages, perfectly pressed flat.

What I’m wondering is if I was to put this on iNat, what would I put for the date and the location? I have no idea where this copy previously was in the past 100+ years or when this leaf was put into the book.

I would love to know what to do! Thank you!

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Apologies if i put this in the wrong category.

You could put it on iNat, but unless you know the date and location it would have to remain casual.

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Cool find! You should make an observation for where you found the leaf in the book but mark the observation as “Not Wild” in the DQA since the leaf is only present in the book because a human intentionally placed it there (barring the really unlikely chance it fell in the book and was pressed perfectly without the reader noticing…).

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Here’s a current example:
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/259659226

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Awesome find! I love coming across little secrets in secondhand books.

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Unlike the leaves which voluntarily enter a plant press.

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I cannot tell if that book is blue or green (my monitor shows it as bluish-green), but given its age, I want to mention the Poison Book Project, in case its front has a green inset (or the cover is indeed green). I understand some antique blue books may contain arsenic as well; this is not my area of expertise by any means.

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Alas, not grass leaves!

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If you don’t know if the plant was wild or cultivated, then don’t invent anything about that.
I would just vote no in the DQA about « Recent evidence of an organism ».

DQA for Recent is intended for fossils.

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Sometimes found objects are just part of the stream of time.

I would put the plant back in the book, and send it off into the future.

I would, however, get a fountain pen and old paper, and write add love letters between two people, remembering the day the the plant was pressed. I’m sure it was during an idyllic picnic, where they read Whitman’s poems to each other, and proposed marriage.

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Wild/not wild does not apply just to whether the original plant (or any organism) was cultivated or wild. It more broadly means:

“Checking captive / cultivated means that the observation is of an organism that exists in the time and place it was observed because humans intended it to be then and there. Likewise, wild / naturalized organisms exist in particular times and places because of other reasons (e.g. members of native or established non-native populations or released/escaped pets, hitchhikers, or vagrants).”

Users can read iNat’s documentation on the term for additional info and examples. As noted above, the leaves are in the book because a human intended them to be.

This specific circumstance is probably most similar to:
butterfly mounted in a display case and not appropriately marked with date and location of original collection

The observer doesn’t know the date and location of the original collection (and didn’t make that collection regardless), so making a Wild observation with those data isn’t an option.

Please don’t do this:

The documentation for this DQA explicitly says that dead leaves are ok:

“the community agrees the observation doesn’t present recent (~100 years) evidence of the organism (e.g. fossils, but tracks, scat, and dead leaves are ok)”

It’s possible that the leaves are >100 years old given the date of the book, though no evidence of that (and more likely that they are more recent). Given that the broadly intended usage of this DQA is for clearly very old evidence (eg, fossils) as @DianaStuder noted, it’s probably best to give this observation the benefit of the doubt.

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So, if one goes out into the primeval forest and photographs a plant, it is an observation of a wild organism. But if one then snips off a twig and presses it between the pages of one’s field notebook and later takes a closeup photo of the twig - hey, presto - in a matter of minutes the very same plant has become “captive, cultivated.”

I once foolishly called this notion foolishness and was reprimanded for doing so. Let’s just call it a curious concept of captive.

In the case of the leaves pressed in the old book, no one knows where or when they were collected, by whom and whether the plant was cultivated. The best DQA is that there is no accurate location or date.

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I’ve taken digital photos of pressed wild plant specimens in my personal collection for submission to iNat. Most of these specimens are 20+ years old. No one has suggested that these records are of captive/cultivated plants.

Edit: the specimens have date and locality info.

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It is ‘not foolish’. iNat jargon means what they say it does.
The intended effect is to prevent a RG obs going to GBIF - because the date and location are unknown. This is in the Broken bucket, not the Cultivated bucket at Not Wild. Why those 2 are lumped together??

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And that’s how it should be. The only difference between your plant specimens and the leaves in the book is that you have a location and a date for your observations whereas there is no such information for the old leaves.

As you have been informed previously, this statement

is incorrect. The date and time of the observation is when the observer interacted with the organism. Users are free to have their own opinions about the best definitions for DQA terms. However, users who downvote observations in this suggested manner as having inaccurate date or location, which is against iNat’s guidelines for how the DQA should be used, could be flagged and curators could take action.

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They could, but they won’t, because I have never disqualified anyone’s observation of any organism for any reason.

Ha ha!