The Specimen That Waited 43 Years
A parasitic wasp 3.5 millimeters (0.14 in) long sat pinned in a drawer at the Natural History Museum, London, for forty-three years before anyone noticed it didn’t match anything else in the collection. It had been collected in 1983 in Valdivia Province, in southern Chile, and filed among thousands of other ichneumonid wasps, a family of parasitic insects that runs to roughly 25,000 identified species worldwide, with an estimated 75,000 more still unnamed, according to the museum.
The wasp stayed exactly that: one specimen in one tray, sorted no further than “ichneumonid,” until Augustijn De Ketelaere, a volunteer working through the museum’s collection, noticed it didn’t fit. He flagged it to Dr. Gavin R. Broad, the museum’s Principal Curator of Insects, and the two of them, with coauthor Jennifer Pullar, concluded it wasn’t just an unidentified species. It was an unidentified genus. They published the description in the Journal of Natural History in 2026, naming it Attenboroughnculus tau to coincide with Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, on May 8, 2026.
What Actually Made It a New Genus
Species get overlooked in collections fairly often. Genera, the broader groupings a species sits inside, are a higher bar, and clearing it took more than one odd feature. De Ketelaere and Broad point to a strongly curved abdominal segment, a polished groove running along the hind legs, and a set of tiny, tooth-like structures on the ovipositor, the blade-like organ female ichneumonids use to lay eggs, often by drilling directly into a host. No single trait was unheard of on its own. It was the combination that didn’t line up with any described genus in the subfamily Pedunculinae.
That subfamily was already a small one. Attenboroughnculus is only its fourth known genus, and tau is only the fourth species described in the group, and just the second ever found in the Neotropics, the biogeographic region covering Central and South America. The species name itself comes from something visible on the specimen: a T-shaped marking across its abdomen, tau being the Greek letter T.
A Whole Genus, Known from One Wasp
As far as the published record goes, Attenboroughnculus tau is one female wasp, collected once, in one place, in 1983. Nobody has reported a second individual since. There’s no population estimate, no range beyond a single point on a map in Valdivia Province, and no confirmed host.
That last gap matters more than it sounds. Ichneumonid wasps are parasitoids: they lay their eggs in or on another invertebrate, typically a specific species at a specific life stage, and the host doesn’t survive the arrangement. Which insect Attenboroughnculus tau targets is, for now, simply unknown. So is whether it still exists in the wild at all. Pedunculinae wasps in general look like a relic lineage that has sat in isolation in Chile since the ancient supercontinent Gondwana broke apart, their closest living relatives now in Australia, a continent this subfamily hasn’t touched in tens of millions of years. As the record stands, the entire genus is one insect in a tray in London.
The Naturalist Who Made the Taxonomist
Broad has said his reason for becoming a taxonomist, a scientist who classifies and names organisms, traces back to childhood, watching Attenborough’s series Life on Earth. “He has been a massive influence on so many of us, and me as well,” Broad said. “I decided from a far too early age I was going to be a taxonomist, thanks to David.”
Attenborough, for his part, put parasitoid wasps on television decades earlier, in The Trials of Life, calling them “body-snatcher wasps” for exactly the behavior that makes Pedunculinae so hard to study in the first place: a living host, raising young it doesn’t survive to see. He already has an echidna, a semi-slug, and a small Peruvian frog carrying his name. The wasp that finally joined them is one he would have recognized the trick of immediately.