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    All Featured Books
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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
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    • Fossil Stories
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    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts in Featured Books

Blog Reel, Featured Books

The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera: A Story of Pirate Publishers, ISSN Hijacking and Fraudulent DOI Assignment

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In 2017, The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera published its final issue. The journal’s website was turned off and, to ensure ongoing access to the biodiversity knowledge contained within its articles, all volumes (1-49) were made freely available on BHL. The final editorial, entitled “JRL R.I.P.” was written by Rudolf H. T. Mattoni, the then President of the Lepidoptera Research Foundation. You can find it on BHL here.

Jump forward five years. On 4 January 2022, Scott Miller (@PNGmoths) tweeted about the sad passing of his friend Rudolf H. T. Mattoni (1927-2022). Miller’s tweet prompted the realisation (by Roderic Page) that a “bad actor” had resurrected the Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera website and had been using the journal’s title and ISSN to publish new articles. From 2018 onward, the fraudulent party published 262 articles in six issues across two volumes. These articles were not about lepidoptera (butterflies and moths); they covered a seemingly random array of topics, including economics, health, and business management.

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October 11, 2022byNicole Kearney
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Catalogue of All Specimens of Natural History Collected by Mr Blandowski’s Party During an Expedition to the Lower Murray in 1857

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Blandowski’s Catalogue is one of the most precious items held by the Museums Victoria Archives. It documents natural history specimens collected by William Blandowski (1822-1878) and Gerard Krefft (1830-1881) and colleagues working with First Peoples communities for the National Museum of Victoria (predecessor of Museums Victoria) during an expedition along the Lower Murray and Darling River from December 1856 to December 1857. Murray fishes listed in the Catalogue were later controversially used to describe prominent members of the Philosophical Institute in Blandowski’s 1858 paper Recent Discoveries in Natural History on the Lower Murray. Blandowski refused to hand-over to Professor Frederick McCoy, the National Museum of Victoria’s first Director, many of the specimens collected on the expedition, and associated research notes and illustrations, causing further controversy. Blandowski’s Catalogue has recently been digitised by BHL Australia and is now available to view online.

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February 24, 2022byNik McGrath
Blog Reel, Featured Books

From Poetry to Pulp Fiction: Carnivorous Plants in Popular Culture

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Carnivorous plants, beguiling vegetables capable of attracting, trapping, and digesting animal prey, have fascinated generations of botanists on nearly every continent. However, there is perhaps no better way to trace their rise to cultural prominence than through the eyes of the Darwin family. The botanical legacy of Charles Darwin, his grandfather Erasmus, and son Francis, conveys the dramatic shift in how carnivorous plants were perceived by general botanical audiences from the late eighteenth century and into the twentieth. From poetic musings about their carnivorous habits to pulp fiction accounts of man-eating vegetal monsters, the BHL carnivorous plant collection offers a glimpse into the powerful spell these plants have cast over readers and observers through the centuries.

Charles Darwin was enamoured with carnivorous plants. As early as 1859, soon after encountering the sundew Drosera rotundifolia on an English heath, the author of On the Origin of Species wrote, “I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world” (Darwin Correspondence Project). By September 1860 he was working with Dionaea muscipula as well, and would later dub the Venus flytrap “one of the most wonderful” plants in the world (Darwin 1875, 286). Darwin’s rigorous experimentation with these enigmatic vegetal carnivores culminated in 1875 with the publication of Insectivorous Plants. This treatise laid the framework for the study of plant carnivory as it exists today and cemented the notion of carnivorous plants in the scientific and public imagination.

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October 28, 2021byJohn R. Schaefer
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Flytraps, Sundews, and Pitchers: Discovering the Carnivorous Plants of BHL

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In a world where staggering habitat destruction and biodiversity loss have become the new normal, understanding the extraordinary interactions between plants and humans is increasingly urgent. Yet the human tendency to ignore the importance of plant-human interactions remains persistent. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to address this gap in plant awareness through an interdisciplinary coalition of programs and scholarship tackling the cultural significance of plants in human affairs.

As the Digital Plant Humanities Intern for Dumbarton Oaks this summer, I will be writing an interactive, visual essay on the cultural history of Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) for the Plant Humanities Lab – a new open access portal developed by Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR Labs. Accompanying this essay is a BHL collection highlighting the wealth of digitized scientific literature and botanical illustration surrounding carnivorous plants. These fascinating organisms attract, capture, and digest animal prey in order to supplement the nutrient-poor soil of their natural habitats. Today, over seven hundred species possessing this specialized suite of adaptations have been identified, evolving at least seven times independently!

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September 23, 2021byJohn R. Schaefer
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Plant Trade and Medicinal Plants in Asia

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Plant species worldwide face an increasing barrage of threats to their survival. The deliberate collection of rare plants poses a far greater threat to wild plant species. In Wild Plants in Trade (1992), the reasons and effects of wild collection on plants for cultivation and international trade can be found. The trade of orchids, bulbs, cycads, palms and tree ferns, cacti and other succulent plants, carnivorous plants and air plants were introduced in detail in the second half of this book, as well as the attempts to control the collection of these plants by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and governments.

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July 22, 2021byZheping Xu, Xuejuan Chen and Tian Jiang
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Farewell to Brood X (2021) — See You in 2038!

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By the time this post publishes, the vast majority of Brood X (2021) will have completed their above ground lifecycle. The vast numbers of adult Magicicada who first emerged in late April and early May will have disappeared, leaving behind their adult bodies as well as still massive numbers of exuviae (cast-off outer skins) from when they emerged as nymphs.

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July 13, 2021byMartin R. Kalfatovic
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Museum für Naturkunde Explores Maria Sibylla Merian’s Legacy and Editions of Her Metamorphosis

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Three hundred and seventy-four years ago on 2 April 1647, a remarkable woman was born: the artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian. In the 17th and 18th century world of male-dominated science, Merian had to fight for her place in the natural sciences. Against all odds, she became a trailblazer, especially in developmental biology.

Merian’s legacy was recently explored during a 4-week student-project at the library of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. The project was part of a master’s program for the University of Applied Science in Leipzig to enlarge the student’s experience in the historical holding field and give a glimpse into the planning and conducting of a project. The aim of the project itself was and is the digitization of two different editions of Merian’s work Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium as well as a restorative and provenance research summary about the volumes. Both editions show Merian’s talent in painting and observing insects and plants.

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June 3, 2021byAntonia Trojok
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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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