Some records appear to be right in downtown Saint Louis or Kansas City. How is that possible?
Many historical records lack specific localities, presumably because early collectors or museums did not record them. Also, localities were not considered as important as they are today and some localities might have been the origin of specimens collected (e.g., a package that arrives from Saint Louis) or even the town where the collecter lived, regardless of the actual collection site. Most of these we tried to accommodate if they were at all reasonable. Many records were labelled with a locality of simply “Saint Louis” or “Kansas City” and they got plotted accordingly. It’s difficult to justify removing a record, even as we realize that some are probably erroneous. Which ones are the result of poor (by our standards) record-keeping? It’s impossible to tell from just the sparse collection data. If we thought a record was completely unreasonable for an area, we simply omitted the record from the atlas. On the other hand, large urban areas were very well collected due to their proximity
