All posts by Martin R. Kalfatovic

Two years ago, on May 9th, Jonathan Fanton of the MacArthur Foundation officially launched the Encyclopedia of Life and it’s key literature component, the Biodiversity Heritage Library.Though the member libraries of the BHL had been working together in various ways since 2005, the official launch at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. can be marked as the jump start to the project.

The Associated Press ran a story on March 20 with the headline, “Rare reptile found first time in 200 years” (see the MSNBC version).The tuatara is a member of the order Sphenodontia and important to the study of the evolution of lizards and snakes. Thought to be extinct on the main islands of New Zealand, the discovery of this hatchling is great news.

Yes, we might be a little slow to the game, but the BHL now has a Twitter account. Please follow us and see what worthy of 140 characters!

Sometime over the past weekend, the Biodiversity Heritage Library portal loaded it’s 10 millionth page!

Due to the way volumes are ingested from the various scanning centers, it’s a bit tricky to pick which was the EXCACT 10 millionth page, but for the sake of this blog post, I’m going to say that it was one of the pages of Coleopterorum catalogus by Junk and Schenkling. I’m picking this item because, as you taxonomic cognoscenti out there know, beetles (coleoptera) represent, perhaps, the most common type of animal. Indeed, the noted biologist J.B.S. Haldane is reputed to have quipped that, if nothing else, nature reveals that God has “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

The Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Encyclopedia of Life shared a table at the Congressional Family Night held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Today, February 12, 2008, we celebrate the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Last year we honored the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linné and next year will be the double celebrations for Darwin’s bicentenary and the sesquicentennial (mark your calenders now for November 24th!) of the publication of On the Origin of Species. 2008 is thus a good year for those of us involved with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) to pause for a moment between these landmark anniversary years of 2007 and 2009.

The Feb. 2, 2008 issue of Science News includes an article by Susan Milius (“Biological Moon Shot”) on the Encyclopedia of Life and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BHL member staff Tom Garnett and Martin Kalfatovic are quote in the article.