All posts from January 2011

For this week’s book of the week, we feature the beautiful illustrations of André Marie Constant Duméril’s Erpétologie générale, ou, Histoire naturelle complète des reptiles, found within the 1854 Atlas volume. In this nine volume work, 1,393 species of reptiles and amphibians are described, and “their anatomy, physiology and bibliography are specified.

While much of the focus today has been concentrated on the existing life on planet Earth, and how to protect and preserve it, there is still a great deal of interest, and indeed things to be learned, from that life which has ceased to exist on our planet. With this in mind, we focus this week on the title Animals of the Past (1901) by Frederic A. Lucas.

Last summer, 2010, we implemented a scanning request form by which our user community can request titles to be scanned and added to our ever-growing online collection. The feature was a runaway success, with 787 requests received to date. As we work to fulfill these requests, we thought it might be nice to highlight just a few of the rare item requests we’ve scanned thus far.

You would be hard-pressed to find someone today who has not seen the legendary Jaws movie. The movie defined a generation and solidified sharks as one of the most gruesome and dangerous killers on the planet. But such misconceptions are an injustice to this diverse, and often harmless, order of fish, some of which reach a mature length shorter than that of an average housecat.