The Moore Lab's Theme Song
An original score written and sung by Garrett Hughes, accompanied by Jason Schaller on guitar.
The Collection Song
by Garrett Brady Hughes A long, long time ago in a place not too distant An entomologist left home with her graduate assistant They searched through trees and forest leaves until they found the one A rare arachnid you might know: a pseudoscorpion And when they caught th’elusive bug they straightaway wrote down The who the when the where and how the specimen was found They wrote it on a little label with archival ink If you saw that note today you could still read it I think Out in the field yeah, out in the field yeah It’s where you go to seek and find arthropods of every kind Out in the field yeah, out in the field yeah ‘Cause if you need new specimens, the only place that you’ll find them is Out in the field And when they got back to the school they put it on a slide Though insects on the other hand are pinned through their top side Either way these arthropods are carefully preserved For future entomologists to study and observe The researchers sent out requests to collections everywhere To borrow other specimens to contrast and compare the differences between each one which helped them make the claim That the species found was undescribed, so they gave it a name Taxonomy yeah, taxonomy yeah A system used to classify all living things beneath the sky Taxonomy yeah, taxonomy yeah ‘Cause if a species is brand new, naming’s what you’ve gotta do Taxonomy The years went by, that specimen was all but long forgot Until a student came along and had a brand new thought The specimen was more unique than others had supposed To make a genus based on it, is what he proposed With DNA from specimens in collections here and there He tested his hypothesis using new software Analyses revealed that this species was distinct And so he wrote a paper up He kept it quite succinct Phylogeny yeah, phylogeny yeah A tree of every living thing linked by evolution’s strings Phylogeny yeah, phylogeny yeah ‘Cause if you really want to know how things diverged so long ago Phylogeny Later on some people thought they ought to build a mine Right where that pseudoscorpion was found for the first time They met with entomologists to counsel and discuss how the plans that they had made might affect the bugs The entomologists reviewed the labels on the slides On several pseudoscorpions of the species from that site Only known from that locale, the species would go extinct If the project wasn’t moved to a new precinct Ecology yeah, ecology yeah If it’s seasonality, or habitat locality Ecology yeah, ecology yeah For natural history, the label tells you what you need Ecology I hope you see yeah, I hope you see yeah Collections fill a special niche, they’re not something that you can ditch I hope you see yeah, I hope you see yeah For our science to progress, we need collections to persist Now you can see |