type specimen

American  

noun

Biology.

1. an individual organism from which the description of a species has been prepared.

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type specimen British  

noun

1. Also called: holotype.  biology the original specimen from which a description of a new species is made

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Etymology

Origin of type specimen

First recorded in 1890–95

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

type specimen

In 2020, the authors set a goal to get a genome sequence for every Psilocybe type specimen.

From Science Daily ● Jan. 9, 2024

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

From Slate ● Jan. 30, 2023

But the type specimen of another species, H. rudolfensis, is a 2.1-million-year-old skull without teeth or a lower jaw.

From Science Magazine ● Mar. 4, 2015

Brown learned that Taylor had collected the first known example, or type specimen, near the town of Bunawan in 1912, and had deposited it at the Philippine Bureau of Science in Manila.

From Nature ● Sep. 12, 2013

It became his earnest wish to be declared the type specimen for Homo sapiens–that is, that his bones would be the official set for the human race.

From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson