The errata weren’t corrections. They were a to-do list. And someone—the apprentice, or a conservator before her—had already started checking items off.
For decades, Mola mola was the default identification. If a sunfish was spotted in the Atlantic, it was Mola mola . If one was spotted in the temperate Pacific, it was Mola mola . This assumption led to a massive historical dataset where the distribution of Mola mola was vastly overstated, obscuring the presence of rarer species like Mola alexandrini or Mola tecta . Mola Errata List