I heard recently on QI that apparently there was a "vacant" position in a museum somewhere for a skeleton of a human to be kept, to be used as the holotype - the reference specimen of Homo sapiens. (Its at the start of the episode below).

For those of you who can't bear to watch Stephen Fry (apparently there are some people out there!), I'll summarise the story as thus: Edward Drinker Cope, a bombastic and rather ruthless paleontologist, realised that there was no H. sapiens holotype, and left it in his will that he wanted his skeleton to be it. However, it was later found that he had syphilis, which made his skeleton unrepresentative and thus invalid. So, there is apparently no holotype.

It's a funny story, but there's not wholly true. Until