All posts from December 2019

In this day and age, science is a serious business pursued by experts who are mostly employed by universities or research facilities. These rational organisations like to trace their lineages back to the late 18^th Century Enlightenment, but such narratives are never linear or straight-forward. In 2001 the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, acquired an extraordinary manuscript, The Naturalists Companion, Containing drawings with suitable descriptions of a vast variety of Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Serpent and Insects; &c accurately copied either from Living Animals or from the stuffed Specimens in the Museums of the College and Dublin Society. This volume, of a miscellany of museum artefacts, natural history specimens, and material culture, exemplified the way many Europeans encountered natural history from the new world: not with Enlightenment rigour but with eclectic and unsystematic enthusiasm.

This month, the Smithsonian celebrates the career of Dr. Nancy E. Gwinn, retiring Director of Smithsonian Libraries. Gwinn’s Smithsonian career began in 1984 when she joined the Libraries, becoming director in 1997. During her tenure, she has made significant contributions to the Smithsonian, the global library community, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

I’m a Deep Time – Peter Buck Fellow in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History where I study the ecology and evolution of prehistoric vertebrates, especially fossil mammals from the Indian subcontinent. The Indian subcontinent has one of the richest mammalian fossil records anywhere in the world. The Siwalik Hills and surrounding regions in Northwest India and Pakistan have a fossil record ranging from about 23 million years ago to about half a million years ago, making this region an ideal place to study how mammalian communities have changed through time.

Fossil mammals in India were first discovered by British explorers and naturalists in the 1830s and 40s. Hugh Falconer, Proby Cautley, W.E. Baker, and H.M. Durand discovered one of the largest deposits of fossil mammals from the Pliocene and Pleistocene (3.6 million years to 0.6 million years) in the region between the rivers Yamuna and Sutlej. These fossils eventually made their way back to the Natural History Museum in London and form one of the most important fossil collections in the world. These collections form the basis of my research on the reassessment of the taxonomy of fossil mammals from India, the biogeography of South Asian mammals, and paleocommunity change.

Not many birds bedazzle as thoroughly as the adult male Painted Bunting. No matter how many you’ve seen or how often, every one remains a source of startlement, whether it is emerging shyly from a Florida thicket, swaying on a heavy grass halm in the deserts of Arizona, or chewing steadily at a feeder in snowy Massachusetts. This, the most gaudily colored bird north of Mexico, is guaranteed to create a stir.

That stir was even greater three hundred years ago, when European natural historians first confronted this novel beauty. So colorful was the bird that the first scientists to describe it believed that it must be native to regions even more exotic than America. Eleazar Albin, in the notes accompanying his or his daughter Elizabeth Albin’s 1737 engraving of the species, reported that the bird had been brought to England from China for the pleasure “of a curious Gentleman” (Albin 1738). A dozen years on, Linnaeus, having failed to find the bird described or depicted in the handbooks available to him, diagnosed it as a new species, which he inscrutably named Emberiza ciris, and determined that with so brightly colored a plumage, the specimens could have come only from India (Linnaeus 1750).

With the benefit of nearly three centuries’ hindsight, such wild geographic speculation was strictly speaking unnecessary. As early as the 1720s, the natural historian Mark Catesby had seen, drawn, and described the Painted Bunting in southeastern North America, an account that he published in London in 1729 (Catesby 1729).