Bird fossils from the Indian Subcontinent

I normally desist from the archaic practice of listing things within meaningless political delineations but a need to locate information on bird (and near-bird) fossils and ichnotaxa from the Indian region led me to the discovery that there are no readily available reviews. This is a rather rough working index of taxa and sources. Additions are welcome.

• Struthio asiaticus A. Milne-Edwards [Siwaliks] (bones, egg-shells from a wider range)
• Dromaeus sivalensis Lydekker [Siwaliks]
• Leptoptilos falconeri (=Argala falconeri) A. Milne-Edwards [Siwaliks]
• Megascelornis sivalensis Lydekker [Siwaliks]
• Pelicanus cautleyi Davies [Siwaliks]
• Vastanavis eocaena Mayr et al., 2007 [Vastan, Gujarat]
• V. cambayensis Mayr et al., 2010 [Vastan, Gujarat]
• Strigidae [Narmada] Patnaik, R & A. Sahni (1994)
• Egg clutch [Lameta, MH] Mohabey D.M.; S.G. Udhoji; K.K. Verma (1993)

Postscript: 8-May-2013

In going through an article by Badam (2005) I came across reproductions of a couple of rock drawings from Kathotia and Firengi south of Bhopal. These have apparently been attributed with some doubt to ostriches by paleographers. The illustration from Firengi is pretty poor for a match with an ostrich and on the other hand is a very good match to a Lesser Florican particularly in the fluffy neck and the two plumes exaggerated on the back. I agree with the authors about the inaccuracy in the detail of feet.

A 30,000 year old rock illustration reproduced from Badam (2005).
The bird on the right is a good match for a Lesser Florican.

An old illustration of Lesser Florican (Sypheotides indicus)

Postscript (24 Dec 2013): An exhibition on rock art at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore included a photograph of the Kathotia bird and it is clear that Badam's sketch is an oversimplification.

PS: 10 Dec 2014 - new paper by - Blinkhorn, J.; Hema Achyuthan; Michael D. Petraglia (2015) Ostrich expansion into India during the Late Pleistocene: Implications for continental dispersal corridors. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 417:80–90.

Late Pleistocene ostrich egg shell records (Blinkhorn et al. 2015)

Sources

• Andrews, C. W. (1911). Notes on some fragments of fossil egg shell of a large struthious bird from southern Algeria, with some remarks on some pieces of egg shell of an ostrich from northern India. In H. Schalow (ed.), Verhandlungen des 5. Internationalen Ornithologen-Kongresses, Berlin 1910, p. 173. Berlin.
• Badam, GL (2005) A note on the ostrich in India since the Miocene. Man and Environment 30(2):97-104. 
• Bednarik, R. G. (1993) About Palaeolithic ostrich eggshell in India. Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin 13:34-43.
• Bidwell, E (1910). Remarks on some fragments of egg shell of a fossil ostrich from India. Ibis 9(4):759-761.
• Davies, W. (1880). On some fossil bird-remains from the Siwalik Hills in the British Museum. The Geological Magazine, New Series, Decade II, 7: 18-27.
• Kumar, G., G. Narvare and R.K. Pancholi. (1988). Engraved ostrich eggshell objects: new evidence of Upper Palaeolithic art in India, Rock Art Research 5: 43-53.
• Mayr, G; Rajendra S; A. Sahni; K. Kumar; L. Singh & T. Smith (2010). Quercypsitta-like birds from the early Eocene of India (Aves, ?Psittaciformes). Journal of Vertebreate Paleontology. 30(2):467-478.
• Mayr, G., Rana, R. S., Sahni, A., & Smith, T. (2007). Oldest fossil avian remains from the Indian subcontinental plate. Current Science, 92(9), 1266-1269.
• Mohabey, D.M. (1989). Avian egg shells from Pleistocene Kachchh. Journal of the Geological Society of India 33:477-481.
• Mohabey D.M.; S.G. Udhoji; K.K. Verma (1993) Palaeontological and sedimentological observations on nonmarine Lameta Formation (Upper Cretaceous) of Maharashtra, India: their palaeoecological and palaeoenvironmental significance. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 105(1-2):83–94.
• Neumayer, E. (1990). A   Note on   ostriches   in   India.   Man   and Environment, 15(1): 25 - 28.
• Lydekker, R. (1884-1886). Indian Tertiary and Post-Tertiary Vertebrata. Vol. III, part 4. Siwalik Birds. Palaeontologia Indica, Calcutta, ser. X, 3: 135-147.
• Lydekker, R. (1890). Note on some fossil Indian bird bones. Rec. Geol. Surv. India 23:235–236.
• Patnaik, R & A. Sahni (1994). Record of a bird humerus from Upper Pleistocene Narmada valley sediments. Journal of the Paleontological Society of India 39:77-79.
• Sahni, A., Kumar, G., Bajpai, Sunil and Srinivasan, S. (1990). A Review of Late Pleistocene Ostriches ( Struthio sp.) in India. Man and Environment,   15(1): 41-47.

Be like a bee

I have written in the past about ant-mimicry (Why look like an ant?), and last week I was reminded how good their relatives, the bees and wasps, are as models for Batesian mimicry. It was just by chance that I noticed this yellow spot on a rock beside a stream running through the forest. 

It was evident that this was a moth, a hawk-moth for sure, confirmed by looking at the hooked tip to the antennae. The remarkable similarity in pattern and size to carpenter bees of the genus Xylocopa is readily evident. As kids we used to play a trick with Xylocopa males that would perch atop wooden posts. Toss a pebble in the direction of the male and it would set off and pursue the pebble. Handling a dead carpenter bee was a painful lesson on how spiny and hard they are. Females can sting but they rarely need to use it. There is probably no predator of adult Xylocopa bees. Little wonder then that several species in the day-flying hawk-moth genus Sataspes have been selected to appear like carpenter bees (other day-fliers like Cephonodes look like clear-winged bees). The genus Sataspes does not seem to be well known in southern India and this observation may be among the few reports from southern India.

Species in the genus appear to show considerable variation within populations in the distribution of blue and yellow on their body and wings. Several of these variants have been described in the past as species and the exact determination of species may be reliably established only by dissecting out their genitalia (which show species-specific lock-and-key patterns). In 1900, a year before he died of malaria, Lionel de Niceville described a species from Burma:

S. tagalica (=S. hauxwelli) and model

"I have named this handsome moth (which is unique) after Mr. T. A. Hauxwell, Deputy Conservator of Forests, who is an enthusiastic collector of birds and Lepidoptera. It is a beautiful mimic of the very common large blue carpenter bee, Xylocopa auripennis, Lepeletier, a male of which I have figured-for the first time-for comparison ..." JBNHS 13:173

Some people find the evolution of mimetic forms too implausible to occur by random processes and those that question evolution pose the question as to how the "exact" same pattern could arise. Interestingly enough there is considerable variation within the mimics and it is actually not an exact imitation. Here are a couple of Xylocopas (unidentified) from southern India just for a sampling.

A Xylocopa from the W. Ghats

A Xylocopa from Bangalore

Looking at the variations in Sataspes it is clear that a series of characters are being mixed in various forms and species.Yellow bands, thorax, tufts, bluish wing shine and so on.

Sataspes xylocoparis described by A G Butler in 1875

Writing about Xylocopa aureipennis in 1922, Cedric Dover notes incredulously:

In addition to the localities noticed by Bingham, the Indian Museum also possesses specimens from the Parjiling District, the Naga Hills and Sibsagar in Assam, South India and Nepal. The species is supposed to be mimicked by a Sphingid moth (Sataspes hauxwelli), which according to De Niceville (Journ. Bomb. Nat. Hist. Soc. XIII, p. 174) was "a beautiful mimic of the very common large blue carpenter-bee Xylocopa auripennis, Lepeletier." The wings of the moth are a deep indigo-blue with bronze markings, which scarcely resembles the wings of the bee, and in the cabinet the whole insect seems entirely different.
De Niceville does not say that the bee and the moth were taken together, and in the absence of definite field-observations, the moth has little claims to being a mimic of the Xylocopa.

My own impression was that the moth above was the right size, shape and colour to give the impression of a carpenter bee.

Although carpenter bees are free from predators, they are not free from parasites and their immature stages probably have predators. A peculiar feature of carpenter bee females is a cavity on the first abdominal segment, known as the acarinarium, which is home to mites of the genus Dinogamassus. Nobody quite knows what the role of these symbiotic(?) mites are. Dr B. Mallik, an acarologist (and one of my teachers) at the entomology department in the University of Agricultural Sciences (Bangalore) showed me some of these mites under a microscope a few years ago pointing out that they stack up in a toroidal pattern.

The fact that so few records of these amazing day-flying moths exist is either due to their rarity or the fact that we have so few people keeping an eye on life around them.

References

• Butler, AG (1875) Descriptions of new Species of Sphingidae. Proceedings of the general meetings for scientific business of the Zoological Society of London 238-261 
• De Niceville, Lionel (1900). On new and little-known Lepidoptera from the Oriental region. J. Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc. 13:157-175.
• Dover, Cedric (1922) A note on the bees of the genera Xylocopa and Bombus in the Indian Museum. Records of the Indian Museum 24:85-89
• Sataspes tagalica, Sataspes xylocoparis, Sataspes infernalis 

Postscript
1-May-2013: Ian J. Kitching of the Natural History Museum notes:

... all the evidence now points towards it being the first representative of infernalis from SW India. All other specimens I have seen from the Western Ghats are the relatively non-metallic forms as shown on SEP. None have the strong blue sheen on the wings of your specimen. ..., the moth does look a bit more like S. tagalica but this usually has a greenish metallic sheen and the females (which your moth is) never have a yellow thorax, only the males. That said, there is a definitive feature that could settle the matter BUT it is on the underside of the abdomen. This is a long shot but do you have a photo in which the colour of the underside of the terminal segments of the abdomen is visible, even slightly. These are yellow in infernalis/xylocoparis and black in tagalica.

All that said, no Sataspes in our collection of any species has the subdorsal rows of yellow spots; they either have more extensive yellow bands (see xylocoparis on SEP) or broad central patches (see tagalica on SEP). So I am minded to think that this may be a new species, or at least a distinctive subspecies of infernalis.

Wild laws

An advertisement in the Times of India Delhi (20-March-2013) with a photograph that violates copyright apart from being of the wrong species (showing a Tree Sparrow instead of a House Sparrow)

A newspaper carried a government advertisement last week. A politician declared the house sparrow as the bird symbol for a state but the picture chosen was just picked off the Internet, was of the wrong species and was a case of unethical reuse. A simple image search via Google allowed me to find the person who took that photograph, Dani Studler, and he confirmed that he was never asked for permission to use that image. This is a violation of the law - the Indian Copyright Act 1957 clearly should be something that the government should have known about. Governments however are not known for being law-abiding.

A training in science and biology does not help in making one a fan of the legal system or indeed of traditional governance and authority. One instead seeks to derive one premise from another. One can consider a principle of fairness. Determining fairness in most cases involves examining if you would approve of an action if it was done by someone else. The actions of legal institutions however is not morality based but driven by other forces - those of economics.

Copyright laws, it turns out grew out of the lobbying first in support of printers. Printing presses came to England in 1476. In later times the booksellers lobbied to change this. There was the Statute of Anne (Wikipedia has an excellent entry on the history of copyright law) in 1710. There were also other controls on the printing press, mostly in the form of censorship. Prior to the Statute of Anne, the printers had a perpetual monopoly on their rights to print copies. The Statute introduced a time limit and this meant that material older than a certain age would go out of control - that is - go into what we call today as the Public Domain. For reasons unknown, the Indian media and government officials routinely use the phrase "public domain" to mean merely that which is publicly available or accessible. Perhaps the government's failure to respect the laws passed by them comes out of this reasoning. Now the legal system spends most of its time taking archaic laws and constantly beaten it into shape to fit the whims-and-fancies of contemporary authorities and cases. The digital revolution however actually requires a complete shake-up of such laws and it was very nice to see an enlightened and refreshing take on the topic.

When material is placed on the Internet - there are so many "copies" - there is one on the server, there are copies on the networks, cached copies in your computer and so on. Search engines like Google makes copies, creates derivatives - indexes that allow searching and so on. So when you browse there are thousands of inadvertent copyright violations happening, if one were to take a strict interpretation. Other sites mix material from multiple sources and completely radical content produces like Wikipedia involve little acts of creativity from large masses of people which make ideas of ownership and authorship increasingly difficult to define. It was therefore of interest to see what William Patry, a Copyright Counsel for Google had to say in How to fix copyright (2012). Like many other things done in Google-style it starts from first principles - his introductory chapter is titled "Unlearning Copyright". Here he notes:

Copyright laws arose out of eighteenth-century markets and technologies, the most important characteristic of which was artificial scarcity. Artificial scarcity was created by a small number of gatekeepers, by relatively high barriers to entry, and by analog limitations on unauthorized copying. Artificial scarcity was important because it created monopoly value: not profits earned above costs of production, but rather profits disconnected to costs.

The spirit of copyright laws is that it protects acts of creativity, however the law does not distinguish the forms of creativity. For the law - a piece of software code, art, music, writing or photography is all creativity. Patry is especially enraged by copyright law advocates who claim that creativity is encouraged by the law. He asks if publishers are involved in creativity when they actually make money out of authors. A devastating case he makes is that of the movie industry and here he cites economist Edward Jay Epstein on the funding of the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Through international transactions on paper with investments leases and retransfers the movie company makes big money which is completely unrelated to the real process of creativity. However he notes that Copyright law gives the assurance to allow the financing that occurs. With tax deductions and other sops, a lot of the money is actually made through taxpayers! Well that is about the private industry but what about the government itself. Exactly what is the idea behind government?

The normative idea of government is that it enables the welfare of people within its borders. The laws of India are however not ones derived bottom up but those that have been adopted from its "rulers". The Indian Copyright Act 1957 is based on Crown Copyright and one of the most stupid clauses in it is that nearly all work done by the government is copyrighted (for a period of 60 years). That for instance means the taxation rules published by the government may not be legally duplicated by anyone. Maps by the survey of India cannot be recopied or modified - no wonder users who want to use maps or any other useful sources are forced to use freely licensed material such as OpenStreetMaps which are made by volunteers. So all the taxes paid and used by the Survey of India are then a complete waste. Similar can be said of things like the Zoological Survey of India, Botanical Survey of India and the hundreds of other government organizations. Contrast this with the laws of the United States of America - examine 17 USC 105 - Sec. 105. Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works :

HOUSE REPORT NO. 94-1476 Scope of the Prohibition.The basic premise of section 105 of the bill is the same as that of section 8 of the present law [section 8 of former title 17] - that works produced for the U.S. Government by its officers and employees should not be subject to copyright.

The provision applies the principle equally to unpublished and published works.

The general prohibition against copyright in section 105 applies to "any work of the United States Government," which is defined in section 101 as "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties." Under this definition a Government official or employee would not be prevented from securing copyright in a work written at that person's own volition and outside his or her duties, even though the subject matter involves the Government work or professional field of the official or employee.

Although the wording of the definition of "work of the United States Government" differs somewhat from that of the definition of "work made for hire," the concepts are intended to be construed in the same way. A more difficult and far-reaching problem is whether the definition should be broadened to prohibit copyright in works prepared under U.S. Government contract or grant.

It is hard to see why India cannot follow such a simple bit of wisdom especially since we do have many talented and visionary people in the judiciary.

Now to get back to the spirit of copyright - that of creativity and examining the principles of fairness - it is hard to see what creativity is involved for instance in recording the song of a bird. All that it means is perhaps an investment in equipment which might be related to the quality of the sounds captured. Wildlife photographers often claim to be non-consumptive but even so-called eco-tourism has been shown to have huge negative impacts. Recent studies of Indian wildlife photographers and the destruction caused by them (see for instance this on a grassland near Bangalore and this on lorises ) through intrusions and  uncontrolled use of SUVs (remember that diesel is subsidised by taxpayers) across the few wilderness regions raises concerns. The application of copyrights to photographs of nature is in a way immoral. When a fashion model is photographed, the model too holds rights. The rapaciousness of wildlife  photographers is unlikely to be controllable by law or through self-regulation. Had the Ministry of Environment and Forests gone the American way, it would have made use of its humongous resources to make available photographs in the public domain (and it is well worth examining what that phrase really means ) of such things as House Sparrows. The government being a recalcitrant entity, one can only hope that at least some enlightened photographers (those that are really interested in preserving the environment) will make available (say on flickr/Wikimedia Commons) their best photographs under a Creative Commons attribution license, allowing all forms of use including commercial use, so as to demonetize and destroy the motivation for competitive photography that leads to damage of the environment.

It is very interesting to see that countries like Bolivia and Ecuador have taken steps towards being more moral in their laws. Bolivia passed a Law of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010. It is only by accepting our biological roots that we can hope for greater morality and ethics. To assume that all humans should have a name that can be transcribed, a surname, gender, an address, a religion, an education and so on is pure arrogance. An organization like the Unique ID authority of India that asks for an address or a fingerprint is just violating human rights - in one case that of nomadic livelihoods and in another those who are  handicapped. One merely needs to see whether a rule can be extended to every other human and every other organism, if it does not, it means that the law is not based on fairness or moral foundations.

Further reading

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_law
• Economics of Hollywood movies
• Lorises endangered by photographers 
• The rights of nature in Bolivia and Ecuador 
• Property rights of animals
• A lawyer's review of Patry's book
• The Guardian on Patry
• The Guardian on another animal right infringement

Postscript: The Government advertisement shown above is copyrighted (in spite of being a violation of Dani Studler's copyright) and will go into the public domain in 2074, however I use this under the fair use claim for the purpose of review/critique that the Indian Copyright Act 1957 allows.

More lice on the naked ape

I have written about lice before and some ecological studies they have inspired. There is however a remarkably simple anthropological question about why humans wear clothes and lice crop up prominently in attempts to answer that puzzle. This rather simple and perhaps ubiquitous childhood question is all too often waved away either because it is taboo or because it has the potential to embarrass. Professional researchers, particularly from less liberal countries tend to shy away from such questions. To be fair however, one must note that the question has not been resolved entirely. Biologists typically seek advantages to such behavioural traits and look for forces that might favour the selection of dressing as opposed to the lack of it.

A newspaper article (via Google)

Books that bring human biology out of the covers usually sell well and although most of us would have read the works of Desmond Morris, it is not often that one actually examines the depth of research in popular writing. A bit of browsing led me to a rather remarkable book by Lawrence Langner called The importance of wearing clothes (1959) which is out-of-print (a digital version can be found on the Internet Archive) and what surprised me more was that it finds mention neither in the Naked Ape nor in Peoplewatching. More remarkable is that Langner, as is evident, was a deep thinker, an excellent researcher but mostly known for being a playwright and seems to have moonlighted as a patent lawyer. An excellent writer, a friend of John Steinbeck (the book is a follow up on a play "Lady Godiva" and dedicated to him) and George Bernard Shaw among other freethinkers, he questions what most laypersons take for granted about human clothing and notes the bias in the western view of cultures at his time where nudity was not acceptable as a norm unlike in some hunter-gatherer societies.

Langner, Lawrence (1963) G.B.S. and the lunatic. Atheneum, New York. p. 120

Rock paintings (20,000 to 12,000 year old)
of ritual clothing from Langner's book

Playwrights are thinkers who excel in the art of putting themselves in the shoes (or out of them in this case) of others. Some years ago I read an excellent essay on why actors would make excellent software designers for exactly the same reason - they can put themselves in the shoes of others and judge software as if they were persons. (It is not surprising that books on user interface design like About Face by Alan Cooper are well received. I have more to say on this topic, particularly on the personality traits that one could attribute to Indian government websites which shine as hall-of-shame  examples that demonstrate a lack of empathy for potential users and portray the worst of government administration. That post will however have to wait for another day.) Langner, the playwright appears to have begun considering the question of human clothing and nudity after writing a play on the subject "Lady Godiva". Langer considers the "why wear clothes" question in his first chapter and suggests protection of the body (especially of men) so as to allow movement through grass and jungle as a driving force in the warmer regions and the more obvious protection from cold in higher latitudes. He attempts to put an evolutionary structure to clothing - starting with primitive aprons for men going on to animal hides and to the use of stitching. He suggests ornaments as precursors of female clothing. In subsequent chapters he branches off into other cultural and social aspects of clothing. Langner quotes extensively from the writings of M.D.C. Crawford (Philosophy in clothing) and J. Flugel (Psychology of clothing - a title reused by Dearborn in 1918) uses many interesting notes and illustrations. Perhaps it is the lack of biological reasoning that leads to the paucity of citations to Langner's work. Or perhaps it is contempt for easy to read research by and for non-professionals, which is reminescent of the contemporary reception to works like The Origin of Birds (by Gerhard Heilmann). Langner ultimately comes to the odd conclusion that clothing brings us closer to our conception of divinity.


The puzzle of human clothing is also related to the puzzle of (relative) hairlessness. Suggestions for adaptive reasons include ideas that hairlessness may suppress ectoparasites (Pagel & Bodmer, 2003) while others have argued that it may aid thermoregulation. (Jablonski, 2004). Other bizarre ideas like aquatic origins have also be considered but the ectoparasite version gives some interesting options that can be examined using modern tools.

12000 year old non-ritual clothing from Langner's book

The larger ectoparasites of humans that are considered in most of these hypotheses are lice. There are three forms of them which live exclusively on Homo sapiens. Most lice actually specialized and live on very specific hosts. Theirs hosts form the islands on which they survive and the only opportunity to avoid inbreeding on their islands is to hop from one host island to another of the same species. This isolation means that their genomic edit histories can be compared to those of their host. This application is extremely well-known in birds where almost every species has its own specific bird-louse. When a bird species (mammals too) goes extinct, their specific bird-lice species can go extinct as well.^* Birds can have several species on them and humans have one that favours the habitat of the hair on the head, another that favours the body and a different species that lives in the pubic region. While the head and pubic louse species hide in hair, the body loving subspecies is actually one that has to seeks shelter in clothes. Attempts to find the age of  divergence of this subspecies from its nearest relative, the head louse yields an age estimate of  72,000 (with quite a lot of room for error, give or take 42,000) years. (Kittler et al., 2003) This then is a surrogate for the age of clothing.

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.      -Jonathan Swift

One would think a better estimate might be got if the study was repeated with something that lives within the lice - an obligate endosymbiont bacterium is known (first noticed by Robert Hooke 300 years ago!) - however it turns out that at least the sequences of this bacterium that were examined were almost identical between samples from head and body lice.(Perotti et al. 2007)

^{* Note: there have been some suggestions that the crab / pubic louse has become endangered due to habitat loss, however there is little serious evidence for it and seems more like newspaper sensationalization.}

The crab/pubic louse and the head louse (from Lloyd, 1918)

 
Further reading

• Crawford, MDC (1940) Philosophy in clothing. [Written for the Clothing Exhibition, March 15-May 5, 1940, at the Brooklyn Museum.]. Brooklyn Institute of arts and sciences. (Hope this text finds its way online)
• Jablonski, Nina G. (2004) The evolution of human skin and skin color. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 33:585–623.
• Kittler, Ralf; Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking (2003) Molecular Evolution of Pediculus humanus and the Origin of Clothing. Current Biology 13:1414–1417. 
• Maunder, JW (1983)  The appreciation of lice. Proc. Royal Inst. G B 5:1–31
• Pagel, Mark and Walter Bodmer (2003) A naked ape would have fewer parasites. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B  270:S117–19.
• Perotti, M. Alejandra; Julie M. Allen; David L. Reed; and Henk R. Braig (2007) Host-symbiont interactions of the primary endosymbiont of human head and body lice. FASEB J 21:1058-1066.
• Rothschild, Miriam & Theresa Clay (1957) Fleas, flukes and cuckoos. Macmillan, New York.
• Toups, Melissa A.; Andrew Kitchen, Jessica E. Light and David L. Reed (2011) Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Use by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa. Mol Biol Evol 28(1): 29-32.

A ramble on knowledge wrangling

Careya arborea

A good ramble can branch off from a pretty tree, in this case Careya arborea - a tree that you can find in many Indian forests. The illustration on the right is from William Roxburgh's Plants of the coast of Coromandel (1919 - volume 3 - plate 218). The artist is not indicated but could well have been one of the Indian artists in the service of Roxburgh. The genus Careya is named after Rev. William Carey, a missionary at Serampore. Carey like many other clergymen of his time took a great deal of interest in science and among other things he founded a society for those interested in economic plants - the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India - in 1820. A lot has been written about the life of William Carey but an old biography that is readily available on the Internet Archive makes an interesting read.

Read the book online

According to the biographer, Carey became a good friend of William Roxburgh whose wife was a daughter of a missionary. Roxburgh held Carey in high regard and out of respect suggested the naming of the Sal tree after him as Careya saulea. Carey protested and it seems like Roxburgh decided to name the sal after John Shore instead (Shorea robusta).

His introductory section in the first volume of the Transactions of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India is a very interesting read. He is very clear about the ends and the means of the scientific method, something that escapes too many professional scientists today. I extract the entire note below (readers would do well to substitute masculine adjectives and pronouns with gender-agnostic substitutes).
  
Prospectus of an Agricultural and Horticultural Society in India

THE advantages arising from a number of persons uniting themselves as a Society for the purpose of carrying forward any undertaking, is now so generally acknowledged, that to detail them appears almost superfluous. Not only must the experience and knowledge of an insulated individual be far less than that of a body of men, but his means for making experiments and conducting necessary operations, must be proportionally more circumscribed. A body of men engaged in the same pursuit, form a joint stock of their information and experience, and thereby put every individual in possession of the sum total acquired by them all. Even the mistakes and miscarriages of its members when recorded, prove a source of advantage to the body, while the labours of every one communicate new energy to his associates, and thus produce exertions which would never have been made, had they continued in their individual capacity instead of uniting as a body. Men of enlarged minds have been long convinced of the great advantages to be derived from Societies of scientific men, and have occasionally recommended them; yet scarcely a Society was formed before the commencement of the last century, and no one before the year 1640. Since the commencement of the last century, however, their advantages have been more and more developed, so that there is now scarcely an object relating either to religion, to science, or to the promotion of arts and manufactures, which is not carried forward by a Society formed for that express purpose.   ...

It is peculiarly desirable that native gentlemen should be eligible as members of the Society, because one of its chief objects will be the improvement of their estates and of the peasantry which reside thereon. They should therefore not only be eligible as members but also as officers of the Society in precisely the same manner as Europeans.

The clarity with which the role of the society and its journal are described did not get lost. The cover of volume 3 (and perhaps later issues) of the journal actually carried the quote - " ... a joint stock of their information ... put every individual in possession of the sum total acquired by them all". In fact I found the cover and the quotation highlighted in M.S.Randhawa's History of Indian Agriculture, a work which also clearly demonstrated to me that the ICAR did in the past have knowledgeable people with a clarity of vision. 

Other scholarly societies came up with essentially the same purpose - the Bombay Natural History Society for instance notes in their first journal issue that:

It was founded on the 15th of September 1883 by seven gentlemen interested in natural history, who proposed to meet monthly and exchange notes, exhibit interesting specimens, and otherwise encourage one another.
...
... One other matter remains to be noticed. No public library in Bombay affords much assistance to the naturalist, and the absolute necessity of having a good library of their own forced itself on the attention of the members of the Society...

Of course, well before this were claims about dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants! It is interesting that enterprises soon lose sight of their original aims and begin to concentrate on tangential efforts related to the means rather than the ends. Organizations begin to bloat into bureaucracies that seem to have have little to do with their original aims. The costs incurred in maintaining the systems increases and the actual output doesn't. People begin to set up hierarchies of positions and the game to rise within them begins. And the potential for growth is definitely greater in non-core activities because the sum of tangential courses will support so many more people than the original path that founders think up. Today a group of people interested in a subject merely need to join an Internet group or email list and that for all purposes is a scholarly society. It produces its transactions on a continuous basis. Old style scholarly societies can either move towards such systems or vanish into obscurity.

Given the antiquity of the vision it is not surprising that we still are attracted to Lennon-esque visions like Jimmy Wales' - Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. A friend recently emphasised the difference between the spirit of this idea and how it differed from literal interpretations and pointed out that there are enough kinds of knowledge that cannot be transmitted (for example tacit knowledge includes such things as the ability to skate, bicycle, balance or swim ...). Literal interpretations will of course not hold up and some researchers have gone to inordinately great lengths to demonstrate this (for instance to show that oral, cultural and traditional knowledge are not captured on Wikipedia - or indeed any other fixed medium). Why has this old idea not yielded more?

Now even though visions and spirit are clear - methods that work in one epoch may not be the best for another. The whole idea that scholarly journals ensure a higher quality of knowledge has now come under scrutiny. Ownership of printing presses is no longer needed for the spread of ideas. An entire industry that lives off the publication and gate-keeping of knowledge has clearly shown itself as parasites of the original spirit of scientific enquiry. But what about the profession of science itself? What about all other professions? Why would a "lawyer" be any more qualified than anyone else? Why would one need to follow an archaic law made by Colonial powers? Why can't questions be asked?

A general suggestion has been that Open Access would cure science of many ills and rid itself of the publishing parasites. Peter Murray-Rust wrote an excellent essay that questioned ideas of Open-ness. Murray-Rust identifies several key principles of open-ness but I think this can be further reduced to just three ideas - which can appear at some level as contradictory (esp. Meritocracy and egalitarianism) but can be compared with analogous ideas in evolutionary theory. Evolutionary systems do not have centralized command (ie. not designed)

• Mechanisms for change - even perhaps to change the underlying rules
• Meritocracy - where the merit of ideas count in decision making - ideas may be put forward, modified and then supported or opposed on the basis of argument (merit = survival of the fittest, ie best supported ideas)
• Egalitarianism - all people are equal (ie all their ideas count)
• Universal participation - no membership boundaries
• process open to all and not only to a few in command, visible to all and results are clear 

Identity traps and in-groups merely support exclusivity

If one really took this path - we should question not just journals and publishers but also the idea of organizations and membership affiliations. Radical thinking involves separating the ends and the means in an enterprise. One interesting idea in software development, which the open-source movement implicitly makes use of has been the idea of "Extreme Programming" (XP) which proposes that good ideas should be taken to their extreme and applied continuously or as intensively as possible. XP principles lead to the idea of continuous testing, regular builds, continuous discussion and continuous improvement. One could apply the principle in an office and ask for instance about the need for meetings and come up with propositions - if meetings were indeed good then why not hold meetings all the time - i.e. over the Internet via a suitable electronic discussion system. What would we get if we put these principles in areas such as governance - why do we elect representatives? If representatives were good, then make everyone a representative. After all the idea of representatives was something needed in an older time with communication problems. One could go on and ask if we really need a parliament, elected representatives holding private sessions. Why cannot everyone (artificial boundaries like nations can very well be disregarded in most cases) see problems, propose solutions while reducing decision makers and executives to a minimum. Decision makers would be the few that are elected and would work in the open keeping everyone informed of the decisions taken, be open to questions answering them in the open and so on. All of this could be continuous and asynchronous processes, not requiring simultaneous presence of participants in the same place and time. Sherry Arnstein introduced the idea that participation can mean a whole spectrum of levels (now called Arnstein's Ladder) and very few participatory systems consciously seek the highest forms of participation and too many "democratic" organizations still live at the level of manipulation, placation and tokenism. Rethinking ideas from the bare basics is something that often improves systems. New methods provide new opportunities that may require one to rethink the original aims rather than merely replace an older component. A system that is trapped in a local optimum needs to be shaken out of stability for it to evolve a path to a stabler solution.

PS: And a timely essay from the opposite side by Evgeny Morozov 
I seem to have missed Peter Murray-Rust's original post which is compulsory reading ... and of course Sherry Arnstein's ladder of participation