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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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  • 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 in Campaigns

Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Fossil Stories, User Stories

From the Experts: Recommended Fossil Books!

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We hope you’ve been enjoying the fossil-mania this week with Fossil Stories! We’ve been exploring the fascinating history of paleontology, learning some great fossil facts, and hearing from experts (via a series of live webcasts) about current fossil research. Our posts have demonstrated the important role that natural history publications have played in the history of paleontology. These works disseminated new research and ideas, documented the evolution of human knowledge about fossils and their origins, and recorded the first scientific descriptions of many ancient creatures. But this literature is important not just for the historical information it provides.
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October 16, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Fossil Stories

Finishing #FossilFossick with #FossilStories

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On October 9, we challenged Smithsonian Transcription volunteers to transcribe the field notes of Ladd, Ward, and G. Arthur Cooper. See the details of the challenge here. It took exactly three and a half days for volunteers to completely transcribe 9 sets of field notes totaling 252 pages. An average of 14 people contributed to each project. The range?
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October 16, 2015byMeghan Ferriter
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Fossil Stories

Illustrating Fossil Plants: The Enigmatic Artis

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Phytology is an historic term, not widely used today, for the study of plants. Antediluvian was a term much used by early paleontologists to describe the “time before the great Biblical flood.” These two terms are necessary to understand the title of an important work in paleobotany: Antediluvian Phytology (1838), by Edmund Tyrell Artis. The formal study of paleobotany has roots in 1828, when Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart, known as the Father of Paleobotany, published Histoire des végétaux fossiles. A decade after this publication, Artis’ work was published.
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October 16, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Fossil Stories

Uncovering the Truth about Fossil Feces: Buckland, Anning, and Coprolites

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When most people think about fossils, they generally think of body fossils, which are fossilized remains of parts of an organism’s body. But there is another type of fossil: trace fossils. Trace fossils are geological records of biological activity, and they provide important insight into an animal’s behavior. One important trace fossil, which provides information about an animal’s diet, is the coprolite. That’s a fancy way of saying fossilized feces. When coprolites were first discovered, they were identified as fossilized fir tree cones or bezoar stones. Bezoar stones were undigested masses found trapped in the gastrointestinal system, and were once believed to have magical properties, capable of neutralizing any poison.
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October 16, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Fossil Stories

The Birth of Dinosaurs: Richard Owen and Dinosauria

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Humans have been encountering the fossilized remains of dinosaurs for millennia. The myth of the dragon, for instance, may be based on discoveries of dinosaur fossils. As an example, Chinese historian, Chang Qu mislabeled such a fossil as a dragon in the 4th century B.C.E. The concept of dinosaurs as a group, however, occurred much more recently…in the nineteenth century, in fact. The first published description of what is now known to be a dinosaur bone (but was thought to be the thighbone of a giant human at the time) occurred in the seventeenth century.
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October 16, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Fossil Stories

Mantell and the Armored Dinosaurs

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British geologist and paleontologist Gideon Mantell is famous for his contributions to the scientific discovery of dinosaurs. In 1825, he described and validly named the second dinosaur genus, Iguanodon. In 1833, he described another dinosaur, which was later used, along with Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, to define Dinosauria. A gunpowder explosion at a quarry in Tilgate Forest, West Sussex, revealed a collection of about fifty fossil bone pieces that were acquired by Mantell in 1832. Mantell discovered that the pieces could be combined into a single, partially articulated skeleton, the most complete dinosaur skeleton known at the time.
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October 16, 2015byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel, Campaigns, Fossil Stories

Live Webcast Today! Behind-the-Scenes Tour of the NHMLA Dino Lab

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The Dino Lab at the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County, is a busy place. The lab is responsible for cleaning and repairing the fossils uncovered by its paleontologists, sculpting missing bones to help fill in fossil gaps, and photographing and archiving the fossils held at the museum. It offers an incredible opportunity for museum visitors to get a true picture of what it takes to prepare a fossil for further research or display in a museum. How would you like to get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Dino Lab at NHMLA? Well, you’re in luck!
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October 16, 2015byGrace Costantino
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Campaigns

Explore exciting topics from Monsters are Real to Garden Stories with Biodiversity Heritage Library campaigns! BHL's campaigns are cross-platform social media events exploring a range of topics through the lens of historic natural history literature.
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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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