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So you probably know that BHL is a global consortium and that to date we have 23 Members and Affiliates plus 8 global nodes. Explore our Members and Affiliates’ contributions to BHL in our latest quarterly report and newsletter.

In 1855, after an exhausting trip across the Amazon, botanist Richard Spruce reached the Escalera Mountains of northern Peru. “I am among magnificent scenery and an interesting vegetation,” he wrote. In 2013, botanist Corine Vriesendorp went back to those same mountains—still remote, still magnificent, and essentially unexplored since Spruce. “Stunningly beautiful,” she wrote.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) welcomes The Field Museum as a new member. One of the original founding institutions of BHL in 2007, The Field Museum has participated in the Biodiversity Heritage Library as an Affiliate since 2012 and now represents the consortium’s 16th Member. Founded in 1893 as the Columbian Museum of Chicago, The Field Museum has been inspiring curiosity about life on earth for more than 120 years.

Cetaceans are not closely related to other aquatic vertebrates and represent a unique lineage derived from hoofed land mammals that returned to an aquatic lifestyle about 50 million years ago (Thewissen, 1998). The transition from land to water, i.e. the development from weight-bearing forelimb with five hoofed toes to tissue-encased flipper not capable to support locomotion on land, is well documented by fossils (Thewissen et al., 2001, 2009) and very different from other aquatic vertebrates. Consequently many morphological characteristics that cannot be detected in fossils have remained little documented or speculative.

Art is an integral part of scientific investigation and documentation. Before the advent of photography, illustrations were used to capture intricate species details, habitat appearance, and even behaviors such as predation. Photography gained popularity as a visual recording method within scientific publications in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, over time increasing the efficiency and accuracy by which nature could be recorded. Scientific illustrations and photographs are an important part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Since the release of Science Gossip a little less than a month ago, 3,600 volunteers have enthusiastically completed 160,000 classifications of natural history illustrations from the pages of 19th century science periodicals!