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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • 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 Featured Books

Blog Reel, Featured Books

In Search of the White Whale: A Legend, a Fossil, a Living Mammal

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1820. Far west of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. A whaleship pursues a pod of sperm whales. Suddenly, an eighty-five foot long giant charges the ship, ramming it with its head not once, but twice, caving in the bows and sending the ship to a watery grave. This is the story of the sinking of the Essex, the subject of Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick’s novel In the Heart of the Sea, opening this Friday.

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December 9, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Travels in Southern Africa: William John Burchell

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William John Burchell is credited “with having been the most prolific collector of botanical and zoological specimens.” [1] During a four-year scientific exploration of South Africa, he amassed a collection of over 63,000 specimens. And yet, Burchell’s contributions to science have been largely overlooked. As William Swainson bemoaned, “science must ever regret that one whose powers of mind were so varied…was so signally neglected in his own country.” [2] 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of Burchell’s return to Cape Town following his four-year expedition in South Africa.
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November 19, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Using Art to Document Species: Cramer and the Lepidoptera

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How could you make a visual record of a collection before the advent of photography? Through illustrations, of course. It was a desire to produce just such a record that prompted the creation of the magnificent plates accompanying De uitlandsche kapellen voorkomende in de drie waereld-deelen, Asia, Africa en America ([1775]-1782), by Pieter Cramer, which has been digitized for BHL by Mann Library, Cornell University. Pieter Cramer was a wealthy linen and wool merchant from Amsterdam. Born in 1721, he had a keen interest in natural history – particularly Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths).
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November 5, 2015byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Eerie Anatomy: Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica

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Halloween is quickly approaching and with it comes the traditional decorations of bats, pumpkins, ghosts and of course, skeletons. Back in the 1500’s, one man changed the way the medical world saw the skeletal and muscular systems of the human body. That man, Andreas Vesalius, illustrated anatomical features in his De humani corporis fabrica (On the structure of the human body) in a way never before seen.

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October 28, 2015byErin Rushing
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, 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
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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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