All posts by Grace Costantino

Since the end of the twentieth century, the genus name Dixiphia has been associated with the white-crowned manakin. A recent investigation, made possible in part thanks to BHL, demonstrated that Dixiphia did not refer to a manakin at all, but was in fact a junior synonym of the white-headed marsh tyrant (genus Arundinicola). The white-crowned manakin was in need of its own, new genus-group name. The manakin mystery was first discovered by researchers Guilherme Renzo Rocha Brito and Guy M. Kirwan. Following the publication of a book on Cotingas and Manakins, Brito and Kirwan received an inquiry from James A.

Over the past three months, BHL has welcomed two new European Affiliates: Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire – Lausanne in Switzerland and the Mendel Museum of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.

On 22 September, Dr. Rod Page, Professor at the University of Glasgow and creator of BioStor, gave a presentation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Library about ideas for extracting and linking data across biodiversity repositories and primary literature. The talk, entitled “The Sam Adams Talk,” covered topics including phylogenetics, geophylogeny visualizations, linking article and specimen data across repositories, annotations, the biodiversity knowledge graph, and data as source code.

Get ready for a ghoulishly good time this October…Page Frights is coming! From 1-31 October, libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions around the world will be gearing up for Halloween by sharing spooky, creepy, or otherwise frightening books and images from their collections on social media using the hashtag #PageFrights. Follow along and join the conversation on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and other social media sites.

If you have ever heard of entomologist Harrison Dyar, there’s a good chance that it was in relation to a series of tunnels that he dug beneath Washington, D.C. Or it may have been in relation to his bigamy. But if that’s all you know about Dyar, then you only know the tabloid tales. Harrison Dyar was Honorary Custodian of Lepidoptera at the United States National Museum for over 30 years. He studied sawflies, moths, butterflies and mosquitos and described hundreds of species and genera.

In May of 1729, the first part of the first fully illustrated book on the flora and fauna of North America was presented to the Royal Society. Upon the conclusion of the work, Royal Society Secretary Cromwell Mortimer praised it as “the most magnificent Work I know of, since the Art of Printing has been discovered” (Nelson and Elliott, 165). The work was The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, and all told it was issued in eleven parts (including an appendix) over an eighteen year period (from 1729-1747).