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Living biodiversity may be the most common topic of discussion in most books found within BHL, but BHL also contains some gems discussing extinct animals as well. One such books is Palaeontology, or, A systematic summary of extinct animals and their geological relations (1860). This important work was written by Sir Richard Owen, an English botanist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist.

Today’s book of the week comes to us from an entomologist who also enjoyed a brief stint as a librarian. British beetles transferred from Curtis’s British entomology by Edward Wesley Janson exemplifies intellectual collaboration within the entomological community during the 19th century, when bug-collecting enjoyed heightened popularity among the general public.

With the month of September having drawn to a close, and the cooler weather descending upon us (yes, even here in San Francisco), it seems a fitting time to draw attention to the contributions of Jean-François Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse and his remarkable (and ill-fated) Pacific voyage. Because it was 223 years ago last month that La Pérouse landed his first French expedition to California, a trip that led to the first published account and image of the California Quail, our state bird since 1931.

Timothy Abbott Conrad (1803-1877) enjoyed a remarkable career, and, although he is best known as an American geologist, malacologist, and carcinologist, he began his professional career as a clerk in his father’s printing and publishing house. It was not until 1831, also the year in which Conrad was elected a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, that he published his first volume, American Marine Conchology, or Descriptions and Colored Figures of the Shells of the Atlantic Coast (several plates from which are pictured here). Intending with this volume to “supply a deficiency which [had] long been felt by the cultivators of American natural history,” this volume contains seventeen plates, all illustrated by Conrad and hand colored by his sister, that depict the abundance and variation of the shells found along America’s coastline.

BHL has released a beta version of its OpenURL Resolver API for testing. A full description of the service is available at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/openurlhelp.aspx. Any repository containing citations to biodiversity literature can use this API to determine whether a given book, volume, article, and/or page is available online through BHL. The service supports both OpenURL 0.1 and OpenURL 1.0 query formats, and can return its response in JSON, XML, or HTML format, providing flexibility for data exchange.

A few weeks ago, we asked you what kind of posts you’d like to see more of here on the BHL blog. The landslide victor–with 9 votes!–is more posts about how researchers are currently using the resources available through BHL. So, meet Kevin de Queiroz. He’s a Research Zoologist working in the Smithsonian’s’ Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Amphibians and Reptiles Division. His current research centers on the phylogenetic relationships of various groups of lizards.