A real butterfly effect - Harvard Gazette

An unknown butterfly collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in the Amazon and forgotten in museum drawers for more than 150 years has been identified as a new species and named Euptychia andrewberryi in honor of Harvard evolutionary biologist Andrew Berry. Andrew Berry is a Wallace scholar who amassed memorabilia linking him to Wallace, including a rare first edition travelogue, an autographed letter, and a 19th-century map. The discovery connects events across Brazil, the Atlantic, London, and Harvard, and highlights Wallace's pioneering contributions to evolution and biogeography. Wallace proposed a theory of natural selection contemporaneously with Charles Darwin but received less recognition. Wallace identified a faunal boundary separating Asia from Australia, New Guinea, and Pacific islands.

"This is a tale of scholarly obsession. It involves a burning ship, a jungle-exploring Victorian naturalist, a Harvard biologist, and a rare butterfly. Evolutionary biologist Andrew Berry is a scholar of Alfred Russel Wallace, a pioneering evolutionist overshadowed by Charles Darwin. Over the years he has collected memorabilia that connect him to his scientific hero, including a rare first edition of travelogues, an autographed letter, and an original 19th-century map."

"Now Berry can claim an even rarer link: A previously-unknown butterfly species collected by Wallace in the Amazon - and forgotten in museum drawers for more than 150 years - has been designated as a new species named in his honor. "I'm absolutely thrilled, sad though it is to be so pathetically vain about having a little brown butterfly named after you," said Berry as he sat in his book-lined office beside a colorful model of his namesake butterfly, Euptychia andrewberryi."

Read at Harvard Gazette