First Known Photographs of Living Specimens
inaturalist.orgIt's sad that most of the commenters here did not care to read the "About" section of the project:
>This project is designed to showcase the first known photographs of living specimens of any species. Note that by 'first known' I'm referring to the first known photographs of a species anywhere, not just the first photographs to be submitted to iNaturalist.
>Two types of observation will be included: 1) First photographic records of undescribed species... 2) First photographic records of already described (but obviously relatively uncommon or cryptic) species...
>If the male and female of a species are sexually dimorphic, then both are valid to be added to the project. So too if a species has distinct life stages (eg caterpillar/chrysalis/butterfly), they are all valid to be separately added to the project (assuming the other rules apply).
>If you see an observation currently in the project that you know is not the first photograph of that species, and you can show the earlier photograph, please do not hesitate to message me and I'll remove it.
It clearly states the photograph has to be the first photograph someone ever taken of the species which they have published(journal/news/book etc.) or publicly shared. Also, historical pictures are welcome, as long as you took the picture. I have seen scanned images uploaded to the project dating back to the 1960s.
Calling it "oldest" instead of "first known" would have avoided most of the confusion.
I'm not sure if the HN article title was changed but the iNaturalist title of the Project is "First Known Photographs of Living Specimens"
I know the guy that created that project, he's also published a paper on how important and valuable it's been for species monitoring and conservation https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10841-021-00350-7
Within the context of iNaturalist. Anyhow, cheers to the iNaturalist team, the work they do and their Seek app. It’s one of the only apps I recommend friends to give to their children to explore, appreciate, and learn about the natural world around them. I just hope they stay relevant in the ChatGPT world. TBH I often use a combination of the two when trying to ID something out in the wild, and ChatGPT many times does a better job.
> Within the context of iNaturalist.
No, he/she meas everywhere:
> Note that by 'first known' I'm referring to the first known photographs of a species anywhere, not just the first photographs to be submitted to iNaturalist.
No, it's confusing but as far as I can tell what they're saying there is that if a species was ever photographed anywhere before, outside of iNaturalist, that species can't be part of the project at all. It's a page for people on iNaturalist who have captured the first known photo of a species.
> but as far as I can tell
Did you actually look at the details? It's literally in rule #1:
> 1 . Any observations you add must be the first photograph(s) of that species anywhere. If an observation is the first one for that species to be uploaded to iNat, but other photos of that species from an earlier point in time already exist anywhere elsewhere online/in print, then that observation should not be added to the project. This is the biggest source of observations that I have to remove from the project. So your observation must be both the first photograph of that species on iNat and also the first anywhere.
I did, but isn't that rule saying exactly the same thing as I said above, just in different words?
I just realized on re-reading your comment that you are actually agreeing with my main point (but it's too late to edit my other comment), you're just saying that I wasn't confident enough in stating it.
I was just trying to be polite with the "as far as I can tell", really. Of course I did look at the details, otherwise I wouldn't know them.
Big, big love for iNat. Up there with Wikipedia as an Internet treasure.
Spring is coming on here and it's getting a lot of use in our house! Don't even have kids.
I'd defend it over ChatGPT if you're prepared to wait. So many knowledgeable people using it. A classic example of the best way to get a correct answer being to post a wrong one!
What steps do you recommend for IDing a weird bug or slug you find in the wild? Do you just upload a photo to chatgpt? What's the equivalent with iNaturalist?
I hope that someone gets a photo of Crump’s Mouse one day.
Absolutely fascinating to see the earliest images of living organisms. Capturing life in such a way was a groundbreaking moment in science.
This seems like such a cool idea for a website, but then it's let down by the fact that it's actually First Known Photographs of Living Specimens Posted To INaturalist.com. I thought it'd be a bunch of photos from the 1800s but it's a bunch of photos from the 2020s.
For example here is the actual first known photo of a domestic cat: https://i.imgur.com/OKtFMos.jpeg
From the About Section of the page:
This project is designed to showcase the first known photographs of living specimens of any species. Note that by 'first known' I'm referring to the first known photographs of a species anywhere, not just the first photographs to be submitted to iNaturalist.
Two types of observation will be included: 1) First photographic records of undescribed species e.g. this Gasteracantha sp. 2) First photographic records of already described (but obviously relatively uncommon or cryptic) species e.g. this wasp fly.
If the male and female of a species are sexually dimorphic, then both are valid to be added to the project. So too if a species has distinct life stages (eg caterpillar/chrysalis/butterfly), they are all valid to be separately added to the project (assuming the other rules apply).
Please only add observations depicting live organisms; this therefore excludes specimens such as pinned insects.
If you see an observation currently in the project that you know is not the first photograph of that species, and you can show the earlier photograph, please do not hesitate to message me and I'll remove it.
I think that the previous poster's point is that historical photographs are not in-scope to be added to this project: for example, this project will never include the first known photo of a living platypus (or a living cat, as noted), because such photos existed before this project began. The project collects photos posted to iNaturalist that meet the specified criteria.
It's a cool collection of modern observations of rare or remote species! But the title could also describe an entirely different research project, focused on historical media rather than modern exploration. That could also be very cool.
> ...historical photographs are not in-scope to be added to this project... because such photos existed before this project began.
That contradicts what the website itself says:
> This project is designed to showcase the first known photographs of living specimens of any species. Note that by 'first known' I'm referring to the first known photographs of a species anywhere, not just the first photographs to be submitted to iNaturalist.
> If you see an observation currently in the project that you know is not the first photograph of that species, and you can show the earlier photograph, please do not hesitate to message me and I'll remove it.
Both statements are in fact correct and non-contradictory. It's confusing, but I believe what they mean in the guidelines is that there are two criteria
- The photos must be on iNaturalist
- The photo must be the first photo of the species ever, not just the first photo on iNaturalist
That is, if a species was ever photographed anywhere before, outside of iNaturalist, that species can't be part of the project, ever.
No, its pretty clear that only first known photographs can be added. If a picture of the species exists in a book somewhere, its not eligible for the project.
The quality of that photo is so bad that it arguably hardly counts as anything, I cannot even understand it's head position. I bet most people wouldn't recognize it as a cat unless you tell them first that its supposed to be one.
This is a very uninformed comment if you understand even the most rudimentary of the problems involved in early photography and the history of the daguerrotype and photograph, specifically, that exposures needed to be multiple seconds long to capture an image.
Yes I know about exposure, this isn't about the technical qualms of any giving photograph but the utility it has for the general public by being smudged to this degree.
The real problem looks like glare, at least to my rudimentarily informed eye.
Lenses and optics in general were also extremely rudimentary at that time, it looks to me like a combination of the cat moving during an 8 second exposure and a hand-ground lens.
The head is on the far left, drinking from the saucer.
So only "good" first photos should count?
Non-smudged photos yeah, otherwise you could say any smudge of colors is any animal you claim.
I mean, the photo is clearly a cat drinking milk from a saucer.
Details and alternative cat photos that are as old (which is "first" is unknown) https://workman.tumblr.com/post/120829319747/houghtonlib-hou...
"clearly" is such a stretch, this photo would be completely useless to someone who has never seen a cat before, they wouldn't learn to recognize it from such picture alone, the other photos you linked do look a lot better.
It's Bigfoot!
Now I'm wondering what was the first viral fake photo of big foot
That's so cool, I live close to a bug only observed once!
Is homo sapiens in there?
On iNaturalist, a Homo sapiens species would automatically be marked as "casual" meaning its not eligible to be a "research-grade" observation
Anyhow species that were first photographed outside of iNaturalist would not be eligible for this project. It is possible however to upload an observation that happened many years ago (even before iNaturalist existed)
>Anyhow species that were first photographed outside of iNaturalist would not be eligible...
To clarify, it would be eligible if the photograph has not been published (i.e. made available publicly outside of iNat) and you own the license.
If you had taken the first-known pics of an animal a few decades ago, and posted them on Facebook earlier, you can still add them to this project, as they fulfill all the technical requirements.
No photos of humans interestingly.
They're not exactly "relatively uncommon or cryptic"
> This project is designed to showcase the first known photographs of living specimens of any species.
Where does it say they need to be rare?
From the page linked:
> First photographic records of already described (but obviously relatively uncommon or cryptic) species
Humans have been photographed before and are therefore out of scope.
They're more specifically out of scope because the first person to ever photograph+publish a picture of a human (which would fit the upload rules as I read it), is long since deceased ;)
(I'm sure someone on here could point us to which photo this would be, though!)
It seems to be this one taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_du_Temple_(photograp...