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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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    Page Frights
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    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts by Allie Swislocki

Blog Reel

Ole Worm’s Cabinet of Wonder: Natural Specimens and Wondrous Monsters

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Ole Worm (1588-1654) was the first, and most well-known, collector in Scandinavia during the Renaissance.  In his homeland, Ole was attributed as the founder of the modern disciplines of archaeology, museology, philology, ethnology, and folklore.  Ole’s cabinet of wonder, documented in a catalog of its holdings, Museum Wormianum was the foundation for what would become Denmark’s National Museum.

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May 9, 2017byLaurel Byrnes
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Ferrante Imperato: Step Into His Cabinet of Wonders!

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Cabinets of Wonder: What Are They and Why Were They Created?

The term, “cabinet of wonder”, comes from the term “wunderkammer” (literally meaning “wonder chamber”). The tradition of creating cabinets of wonder began during the Renaissance, the period of time between the 14th and 17th centuries.

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March 13, 2017byLaurel Byrnes
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Page Frights

Monsters in Nature: Frightful Tales from the 19th Century

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Today’s book is truly filled with Page Frights! Sea and Land: An Illustrated History of the Wonderful and Curious Things of Nature Existing Before and Since the Deluge, by James W. Buel (1849-1920), highlights some truly horrific creatures and plants, with colorful tales and an abundance of amazing illustrations. You can read about, and see images of, giant prehistoric and contemporary land, air and sea creatures, sometimes in battle with one another and sometimes battling humans–including early man.

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October 11, 2016byLaurel Byrnes
BHL News, Blog Reel

Earth Day 2016!

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Happy Earth Day!  This special day for recognizing and fighting the serious and negative effects of climate change began on April 22nd, 1970.  On that first Earth Day, 20 million Americans peacefully demonstrated to shine light on the devastating effects of modern life and production on wildlife and the climate.  Soon after this the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and other laws meant to protect the environment were passed by the government.  By the 1990s Earth Day expanded and came to be celebrated by over 200 million people in 141 countries–and now more than 1 billion people all around the world participate on Earth Day in order to help the environment.
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April 22, 2016byLaurel Byrnes
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Ancient Myths Inspired by Fossils

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The study of mythology associated with fossils is a relatively new field, which Adrienne Mayor (2005) terms “the folklore of paleontology”; she continues by saying that “[c]ombining oral traditions and paleontology, and drawing on history, archaeology, anthropology, and mythology, the investigation of fossil legends offers a new way of thinking about pre-Darwinian encounters with prehistoric remains” (Preface, p. xxiv). Drawing from several resources, one can create a dynamic picture of what a large variety of cultures around the world and throughout time have thought were the myths associated with dinosaur, bird, and other prehistoric fossils. Due to extensive travel, Greeks and Romans discovered fossils throughout the Mediterranean and into India (Mayor, 2000b, p. 8).
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October 13, 2015byLaurel Byrnes
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Garden Stories

Antique Seed Catalogs and Heirloom Gardening

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When you think of an “heirloom plant”, you may be imagining a plant that has changed little in over a hundred years—something our great- great-grandparents would have farmed and eaten. However, the definition of an heirloom plant is a bit more fluid than that, and not only includes edibles but also plants such as flowers, herbs, bulbs, and shrubs.  In fact, there is no singular consensus on how many years a plant has to have remained unchanged to be considered an heirloom. Some groups use cut-off dates—meaning dates after which the plant has not changed. For instance, 1940 is the cut-off date used by the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virigina.

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March 24, 2015byLaurel Byrnes
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Early Women In Science: Trekking Through Nature, Trailblazing Their Way Through History

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The sixteen women featured in the “Early Women In Science” exhibition are each extraordinary for unique reasons.  One trait they all share is that they were doing work in scientific fields reserved for men. They sometimes had to fight for recognition of their work—or went completely unrecognized for some of their major contributions. For instance, Maria Emma Gray (1787-1876) was a talented natural history illustrator.
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December 9, 2014byLaurel Byrnes

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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