For any scientist in the museum the great hope is that some day the routine task of gathering specimens will throw up new things to science, and to the greatest accolade of all, naming them. My name is Sandy Knapp and I'm a plant taxonomist. I figure out what species are and I describe new species and I also look at the evolutionary relationships amongst those species. If you think about variation, human beings are variable, each of us looks quite different, but we're still all the same species, that's the same kind of thing we do. My particular specialty is the Solanaceae, things like potatoes, tomatoes, petunias, tobacco, and so it's one of those families that's really used a lot by people, and to me that gives it that human dimension which makes it fun for me. Some of the describing of a new species is trying to figure out what you're going to call it, so I'm describing a new species from Peru which I'm going to call after a man who's helped loads of us who've collected in Peru called Don Isidoro Sanchez Vega, and it's going to be called Solanum Sanchez-vegae.


博物馆的所有科学家们在他们例行的标本收集工作中都希望有那么一天，能为科学作出新的贡献，而其最高嘉奖莫过于能成为其名称。 我的名字是山迪耐普，是一名植物分类学家。我要鉴别物种种类并描述新的物种。我还要关注这些物种之间的进化联系。如果只考虑差异，人们之间就有差异，每个人看起来都不一样。不过我们仍然是同一物种，这就和我的工作差不多。我的专长是茄属植物，像是马铃薯，番茄，矮牵牛，烟草，所以这是一组人们经常使用的植物。 这就为这工作加了一个人类视角，在我看来很有意思，描述新物种的一个环节是要确定我们该怎么称呼它。我在描述一个来自秘鲁的新物种，我准备用一个对我们有过非常大帮助的人来为其命名。他叫多尼西多罗桑切斯维嘉，在秘鲁帮我们收集标本，这植物就被命名为茄属桑切斯维基