Leafcutter bee new to science with specimen data on Canadensys

Thursday, 4 April 2013

Dr. Cory Sheffield, Research Scientist & Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, SK had a paper published April 3, 2013 in the journal ZooKeys in which he named and described Megachile chomskyi. This new species of leafcutter bee is approximately 13mm long, has a relatively long tongue, white pubescence and is named after Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT. The male holotype and female allotype are deposited at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and were both collected in Winkler Co., Texas.

Male holotype of the newly described bee, Megachile chomskyi Sheffield, 2013.
Credit: Cory S. Sheffield (Royal Saskatchewan Museum). Usage Restrictions: CC-BY 3.0.

Female allotype of the newly described bee, Megachile chomskyi Sheffield, 2013.
Credit: Cory S. Sheffield (Royal Saskatchewan Museum). Usage Restrictions: CC-BY 3.0.

Type locality of Megachile chomskyi, Sheffield 2013.

When Dr. Sheffield’s paper was under review, he asked if Canadensys could host the specimen data associated with this new species.

Absolutely!

We helped transform his specimen data into Darwin Core, uploaded them into our Integrated Publishing Toolkit, produced a privately accessible Darwin Core Archive, assigned the package a provisional DOI that he cited in his proofs, and then waited by the telephone. Once we received the good news that his paper was published we quickly published the data package and produced a DataCite XML document using our simple transformation tool and minted the DOI.

The outcome is a bi-directional link between Dr. Sheffield’s paper, doi:10.3897/zookeys.283.4674 and the associated digital package of specimen data, doi:10.5886/txsd3at3. If you have the scientific paper in hand, you can quickly download the standardized specimen data. If you have the specimen data, you can quickly download the paper. And, thanks to the magic of DOI redirection, the cited links need not change even if ZooKeys or Canadensys find other hosts in the future to serve the PDF or the specimen data, respectively.

Dr. Sheffield has charted a new cybertaxonomic direction for Canadensys and we’re excited to help serve future taxonomic works.