All posts in Featured Books

History never looks too kindly on second place. Neil Armstrong rolls off the tongue as the first man to walk on the moon, but most people hesitate at Buzz Aldrin. Mack Robinson came from a famously athletic family–older brother to Jackie Robinson–and broke the 200-meter world record in the 1936 Olympics. Of course his name is merely the answer to an obscure trivia question as he didn’t win the gold, second only to Jesse Owens. Charles Darwin is so closely associated with evolution and natural selection that his name literally serves as a synonym for the theory.

Do you know your state flower or bird? What about your state fossil? It is okay if you know the first two and not the third. Many don’t know their state fossil. There’s no better time to discover it than today — National Fossil Day.

This week we are celebrating cephlapods. Not sure what they are? Cephalopods are a group of exclusively marine mollusks that include squid, octopus and nautilus. They are closely related to snails, slugs and clams. Let’s be honest, you might be most familiar with them on your plate. These intelligent but vulnerable invertebrates are fascinating. They are represented in fossil records as long ago as 500 million years. If I had to pick, I’d say squids are my favorite 8-legged species, and not just because this is Squidturday. Squids defend themselves by being agile and fast as well as releasing sepia, often referred to as ink.

Two BHL-related projects were recently presented during the Digital History and Philosophy of Science (Digital HPS) meeting held at Indiana University, Bloomington, September 6-7. Trish Rose-Sandler, from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Biodiversity Informatics, spoke about the Art of Life project.  Daron Dierkes, from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Peter H. Raven Library, spoke about the George Engelmann Correspondence Project. The Art of Life is a project to identify and describe the rich natural history illustrations hidden within the pages of BHL literature.

“Promoting the protection and care of rabbits, both domestic and wild,” Saturday September 28 is International Rabbit Day and we couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the Leporidae than to highlight some of our favorite literature about rabbits from the BHL collection. From our Darwin’s Library collection, a virtual reconstruction of the set of the surviving works held in Charles Darwin’s personal library, “The rabbit book” outlines the history of the rabbit, its varieties at the time, and provides instructions for their care and breeding.