Herbarium Type Specimen: Schoenocaulon officinale

This is not a cartoon or caricature. The image shows a pressed and mounted botanical type specimen — Schoenocaulon officinale (Cham. & Schltdl.) A.Gray ex Benth., a slender monocot of the family Melanthiaceae, native to Mexico and Central America — preserved on herbarium paper with identifying labels, a color-calibration card, and a ruled scale bar. A type specimen is the physical name-bearer of a species, the single reference against which all future identifications are measured. No satirical tradition applies here. Displaying it in a comics-history exhibition would be a curatorial error; this object belongs to the history of systematic botany, not print satire.