All posts by Grace Costantino

We’re excited to announce the launch of the new About BHL site!

What is BHL’s history? Who’s involved in the Library? What tools and services does BHL offer? How do you search, download content or access data and developer tools in BHL? How can you get involved in the Library? What projects has BHL engaged in?

Find the answers to these questions and much more information about the Biodiversity Heritage Library on our new About site at about.biodiversitylibrary.org!

The new site, which lives alongside and is linked from our digital library portal at

The passenger pigeon’s demise is one of the most infamous examples of human-caused extinction. Once the most abundant bird species in North America, it was hunted relentlessly, with large-scale commercial hunting facilitated by railroad distribution placing excessive pressure on the species. The population declined from billions to none in less than one hundred years.

The last passenger pigeon, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden at about 1pm on September 1, 1914.

While stories of passenger pigeon flocks blackening the skies underscore the species’ once staggering abundance, its distribution was concentrated in the eastern United States. But could there have been resident populations in the western U.S.?

Passenger pigeon bones uncovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California inspired Dr. Libby Ellwood to ask this very question and embark on a research project empowered by the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s collections.

Íris Sampaio, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Oceanography and Fisheries at the University of the Azores & Senckenberg am Meer, Germany, has been studying octocoral taxonomy and ecology for eleven years. Résultats des campagnes has had a significant impact on Sampaio’s research, providing her with data on octocoral species collected in the Azores. Thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, she now has easy access to the title’s public domain volumes.

Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium has been described as one of the most beautiful works devoted to frogs and amphibians.

The work of German artist and naturalist Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium describes the natural history of all then-known frogs and toads indigenous to the Nuremberg region in Germany. The title is noteworthy first for the extensive, accurate information in the text, printed in two columns in both German and Latin.

The work is equally (if not more) renowned for its illustrations. The twenty-four folio, hand-colored copper engravings portray habitats, anatomy, reproductive behavior, and larval development stages in intricate detail.

“The Librarian’s Nightmare.”

Such is the name given to a delightful and quirky vignette found within a very rare, and very special, orchid book: James Bateman’s The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala ([1837]-1843).

This vignette, the work of caricaturist George Cruikshank, depicts a group of men struggling to lift an enormous book using a pulley system while a harried taskmaster with a megaphone attempts to direct their work and demons dance about with impish glee on the sidelines.

The vignette’s caption, translated from the Greek, reads “a big book is a big evil”.

The scene is a humorous commentary on the massive size of Bateman’s orchid book. At about 30” x 22” and weighing in at over 38 lbs, it is the “largest botanical book ever produced with lithographic plates”.

Using molecular species delimitation methods, Dr. Fernando Á. Fernández-Álvarez, a post-doc at Institut de Ciències del Mar (CSIC) in Barcelona, and his colleagues[1] found that what is currently described as Ommastrephes bartramii actually represents four different species. After examining previous descriptions in the literature, three synonymized names have been proposed for resurrection accordingly. This research comprises one of four chapters in Fernández-Álvarez’s Ph.D. thesis, and the manuscript is currently under preparation for submission to a journal.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library proved to be a vital resource for these research, allowing Fernández-Álvarez to easily locate literature about relevant synonymized names, many of which were published in the 19th century.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is pleased to welcome the Lloyd Library & Museum as its newest Affiliate.

Founded in the 1870s, the Lloyd Library & Museum’s origins trace back to a collection of reference materials acquired by the brothers John Uri Lloyd (1849-1936) and Curtis Gates Lloyd (1859-1926), both trained pharmacists of the botanical medicine era. The Library, which continues to build its collection thanks to an endowment established by Curtis Lloyd, holds approximately 150,000 volumes on a range of topics, including botany, mycology, herbal medicine, gardening, and horticulture.