- Home >
- Nature online >
- Collections at the Museum >
- Wallace Collection >
- Themes >
- Collecting
Primary navigation
- Collections at the Museum
- Wallace Collection
- Introduction
- Online collection
- Architecture
- Biography
-
Collecting
- Butterfly specimens showing Batesian mimicry
- Butterfly specimens showing sexual dimorphism
- Specimens of birdwing butterflies (Papilionidae)
- Specimens of Asian beetles
- Specimens of bugs, crickets and other insects
- Specimens of stick and leaf insects, and a stag-horned deer-fly and other insects
- Specimen pieces of bird and marsupial skin
- Specimens of dead leaf butterflies and Trogonoptera brookiana
- Collecting and sending insects to Bates
- Collecting insects in Wales
- Designing an insect cabinet
- Exchanging insect lists with Bates and keeping a journal
- Herbert Wallace collecting in Brazil
- Fish drawing from the Rio Negro - Curimata species
- Descriptions of fishes from the Upper Rio Negro - Curimata species
- Fish drawing from the Upper Rio Negro - Ageneiosus species
- Descriptions of fishes from the Rio Negro - Ageneiosus species
- Wallace is shipwrecked and loses his collections
- The start of Wallace's Malay Archipelago expedition
- Collecting insects in Singapore
- Collecting insects in Malacca and Mount Ophir
- Qualities of a good field assistant and hand-rearing an orang-utan
- Collecting in Borneo and the departure of his assistant
- The insect life of the Malay Archipelago
- Notes on birds in Macassar
- List of expedition food supplies
- Insects and their colouring
- Wallace on biogeography
- Payment to Wallace by the British Museum
- Problems with the British Museum paying Wallace
- Insect list from the Malay Archipelago
- The Malay Archipelago book - map and dedication
- Photograph of Fred Birch
- Evolution
- Family
- Naturalist
- Social issues
- Spiritualism
- Search
Specimens of stick and leaf insects, and a stag-horned deer-fly and other insects
Catalogue number: Drawer 28
Wallace's specimens of stick and leaf insects, a stag-horned deer-fly and other insects from Asia.
This drawer of Wallace's south-east Asian insect specimens is
one that was restored from a jigsaw of broken limbs and bodies. The
result is a magnificent display of 31 individuals, among which are
stick and leaf insects (Phasmida), praying mantids (Mantodea),
bush-crickets and grasshoppers (Orthoptera), and ants (Hymenoptera:
Formicidae).
Looking carefully at the middle-right of this drawer you can see a
tiny fly. This is from a group of flies (genus Phytalmia)
found in New Guinea and Australia. The males have extraordinary
projections from their heads, which look almost like the antlers of
deer. Males use these 'antlers' in combat. They guard the
places where females lay their eggs on rotting logs and fight other
males that land there.
In Wallace's book The Malay Archipelago (1869) he notes that the flies 'are about half an inch long, slender-bodied, and with very long legs, which they draw together so as to elevate their bodies high above the surface they are standing upon...the horns spring from beneath the eye, and seem to be a prolongation of the lower part of the orbit. In the largest and most singular species, named Elaphomia cervicornis or the stag-horned deer-fly, these horns are nearly as long as the body...' The specimen in this drawer is a male of the stag-horned deer-fly (Phytalmia cervicornis), collected by Wallace on Waigeo Island, Irian Jaya. There is a woodcut on page 502 of the book captioned 'antlered flies'.
Toolbox
Contact us
For enquiries about the Wallace Collection please email the library
Search this collection
Wallace Letters Online
View high resolution scans and transcripts of Alfred Russel Wallace's correspondence, including all surviving letters between him and Charles Darwin.