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BHL Program Director Martin R. Kalfatovic attended the Catalogue of Life Mini-symposium at the Flanders Marine Institute in Oostende, Belgium on 2 April 2015.

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.

BHL Members and Affiliates met in Chicago, IL, for the 2015 Annual Meeting (17-18 March 2015). The annual meeting is a chance for BHL Member and Affiliate representatives to learn what is happening around BHL and to give updates from their own institutions. This year, the meeting was hosted by Christine Giannoni (Museum Librarian & Head of Library Collections, The Field Museum Library) at The Field Museum, one of the original founding institutions of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Since 2012, The Field Museum has participated in BHL as an Affiliate. The venue was a decidedly appropriate one, as, on the first day of the meeting, The Field Museum announced their decision to join BHL as a Member institution!

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!