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My name is Michelle Pinsdorf, and I am a paleontologist and preparator of fossil vertebrates in the Smithsonian National Natural History Museum’s Department of Paleobiology. Preparators’ work can cover a wide variety of duties, from fieldwork to discovering new fossil specimens, to freeing those specimens from their surrounding host rock in our laboratories, to safely housing specimens for research collections, and helping to build exhibits for specimens going out on display. We call it “grave to cradle” work.

Most of the time you’ll find a fossil preparator leaning over a lab bench with a fine tool in hand, peering through a microscope and exposing the details of a fossil that helps researchers identify and publish about it. But for the past five years, my lab colleagues and I have been working on the renovation of the Natural History Museum’s fossil exhibits. This has involved the dismantling of many previously exhibited fossil mounts to allow for the conservation of the fossils and remounting them in new poses and settings. With the significant scientific value of these fossils, a lot of research and planning happens before each individual specimen is worked on.

In October 2019, more than 700 people from over 75 countries gathered in Leiden, the Netherlands for Biodiversity_Next, a joint conference by GBIF, DISSCo, iDigBio, CETAF, TDWG, and LifeWatch Eric. Hosted by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a BHL Affiliate, in collaboration with the Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility, the main conference ran from 22-25 October 2019, with pre-conference workshops occurring 20-21 October, as well as organization-specific meetings for GBIF, CETAF, and TDWG being held in conjunction with the conference. Eighteen BHL-affiliated representatives from our partner community, representing 13 institutions from nine countries, attended the conference, and 11 BHL-affiliated staff presented or moderated 16 talks or sessions. Dr. Elycia Wallis (Atlas of Living Australia; BHL Member representative for BHL Australia) served as a key member of the Programme Committee. Members of the BHL Executive Committee (EC) and colleagues from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle represented BHL at the various organizational meetings, including GBIF, TDWG, and CETAF.

Do you want to help empower global biodiversity research and serve as part of a vibrant, international community dedicated to providing free, worldwide access to biodiversity information? The Biodiversity Heritage Library seeks a Program Manager committed to elevating current successes and challenging our Program into the future by ensuring organizational excellence, fostering strategic partnerships, and embracing advances in digital technologies, information science, big data, and bioinformatics to serve the evolving needs of 21st century researchers.

I’m Bonnie Felts, and I am a library technician for Smithsonian Libraries at the Natural History Museum. What most people don’t realize about our museum is that we have a total of 11 separate library locations, and I work with five of the collections. I am primarily responsible for the Vertebrate Paleontology library, which requires fielding reference questions, purchasing materials pertinent to the collection, and the overall care of the materials. Although in numbers, the library is relatively small compared to other libraries in our building, it is one of the most comprehensive Vertebrate Paleontology literature collections in the world.

Halloween is just around the corner, and the skeletons have come out of the closet. From front yards reimagined as graveyards to bone-chilling retail displays and party backdrops rattling with more than a few spare ribs, bones are on display to awaken the Halloween spirit and set a ghoulish mood to the delight of trick-or-treaters everywhere.

The modern-day Halloween is derived from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. With the Celtic new year celebrated on November 1, October 31 marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the cold, dark winter. Samhain, celebrated the evening of October 31, was believed to be a time when the boundary between the worlds of life and death were blurred, allowing the ghosts of the dead to return (History.com 2019).

Over time, Halloween has evolved into the costume-wearing, trick-or-treating holiday that it is today, but the season’s association with death has remained, evidenced by the proliferation of ghosts and skeletons intertwined with modern-day celebrations.

Embracing the Halloween season’s bony obsession, this month’s book of the month is one devoted to the skeleton — Osteographia (1733), which has been described as “one of the most important and beautiful books in the British anatomical tradition” (Neher 2010, 517). This work is freely available in BHL thanks to the Library and Archives of the Natural History Museum in London.

It is bird week from the 21st -27th of October. During this week, we would like to share with you some of the wonderful rare reference books on Australian birds and the stories behind them. These books have been digitised by the Biodiversity Heritage Library and are freely available in open access. The scientific reference works showcased this week include books from 1781 through to 1931. Ornithologists used these books to describe new species found within Australia and added to the growing number of previously undescribed birds during this time.

I study sloths, and as popular as they have become on the internet, the thing most people do not realize is that we are living in a world majorly deprived of most types of sloth. Today there are only two types of sloths: two-fingered (genus Choloepus) and three-fingered (genus Bradypus). (You may have heard them referred to a two-toed and three-toed, but they both have three digits on their hind limb, so the difference is on the forelimb, in other words, their hand, hence: fingers.) There are only a few species of each kind of sloth and they all live in the trees of tropical rainforests in Central and South America.

But back in prehistoric times, there were many types of sloths: more than 80 genera across five different families. They lived as far north as the Yukon Territory and Alaska, as far south as Patagonia, and stretched from coast to coast in the United States and even colonized islands throughout the Caribbean. The smallest of these fossil sloths were still bigger than any sloth alive today, and the biggest extinct sloths were the size of modern elephants (but could probably walk around on two legs like an awkward bear). All this means there is a lot to learn about the sloths that are no longer with us.