Visiting Scientist Feature: Dr. Rowland Shelley

Last Friday, we hosted Dr. Rowland Shelley, an expert on millipedes and tropical centipedes, with a research career of almost half a century (47 years).

Dr. Shelley is retired but still active as an adjunct professor at the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Tennessee, and a research associate at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, Museum of Entomology.

This visit to Singapore, and LKCNHM, is his first.

“I like to go to (natural history) museums; I have been to the ones in Europe, North and South America, and Australia, but have not visited any in Asia,” he said.

During his short 1-day visit, he examined millipede specimens from the family Platyrhacidae that are in our Zoological Reference Collection (ZRC). The specimens are from the former private collection of the late Chinese zoologist, Prof. Yu-Hsi Moltze Wang.

Millipedes in the family Platyrhacidae (also known as platyrhacids) occur in two widely separated geographic areas – most described species are recorded from Southeast Asia, and the rest in the New World Tropics (Neotropics) ranging from Central to South America. Platyrhacids are often large in size and colourful, exhibiting myriad colours such as red, blue, yellow and green.

“You’ll be able to spot them from far away,” said Dr. Shelley.

Dr. Shelley is currently supervising a South American graduate student who is working on the taxonomy of platyrhacids from the Neotropics; he hopes that this student would be able to include species from Southeast Asia in her research one day.

Dr. Shelley has published up to 300 papers on mainly New World millipedes in North America, but has little experience with Old World Asian millipedes. Thus, in order to evaluate future research possibilities for his student, he made a trip to LKCNHM to assess available platyrhacid material in our collections.

Also, after finding out about his impending visit to LKCNHM, Dr. Shelley’s Russian friend and colleague – Dr. Sergei Golovatch – asked him for help in obtaining images of a type specimen of the millipede Phenacoporus kedahensis Wang & Tang, 1965.

With the help from Mr. Foo Maosheng (curator of the cryogenic collection in LKCNHM), Dr. Shelley managed to obtain high quality images of the type specimen, taken using the museum’s Dun Inc.^TM Passport II macrophotography imaging system.

At the end of his visit, Dr. Shelley had a tour of our collections courtesy of his host, Dr. Wendy Wang, the curator of insects and other terrestrial arthropods at LKCNHM.

He was duly impressed by the overall maintenance and organisation of the specimens in our collections.

“I hope that more people can deposit their specimens here,” he said.

“I will not hesitate to deposit any material here, if I collect any in the future,” he added.

We are very pleased to have hosted Dr. Shelley during his first visit to the museum. We wish him all the best for his future endeavours, and hope to see him again!