All posts in Featured Books

Over the past few months, I’ve been working as the Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr Content Volunteer. As someone who really values the cross-section between art and science, it’s a fascinating task. The Flickr page is full of beautiful images of flowers, birds, and butterflies.

This is the final post of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events. In 1878 the United States Congress was investigating rivalries between four surveys (Powell, Hayden, King, and Wheeler Surveys) that had been sent west to study the nation’s resources and search for a potential route for a railroad to the west coast. The investigation made it clear to Congress that the current system was not working.

This is the second of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events. The first post in this series about organizations discussed the nascence of the US Biological Survey.

Beauty can be too much for words. So it is with the charm of what many consider the loveliest of the world’s birds, the hummingbirds: Overcome by the dazzling colors of those first tiny skins, early European naturalists reached to the limits of their vocabularies to describe them. The result, nearly five centuries after the first specimens were brought back from a then truly New World, is a large set of remarkably evocative names, hillstars and woodstars, helmetcrests and plumeleteers, jacobins and incas, metaltails and thornbills, emeralds and sapphires and topazes and rubies.

The birds, of course, are every bit as fantastic as their monikers.

It’s no secret that the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a top-notch resource for legacy biodiversity publications. The current U.S. copyright law states that if a title was published over 90 years ago, that title has entered the public domain and is out of copyright. This allows the BHL to digitize and provide access to an astounding number of volumes published before 1923. However, that 1923 cut-off isn’t the end-all, be-all for BHL. An often overlooked aspect of the portal is that it provides access to several post-1922 titles.

As part of BHL’s Winter Appeal, we’re highlighting some of the amazing species that are especially well-adapted to cold, wintery climes as well as those that often come to mind as we celebrate the winter holidays.  Last week we featured Ursus maritimus, the magnificent apex predator of the Arctic commonly known as the polar bear.

Have you ever collected seashells from the sea shore? Ever wonder where they come from or the former inhabitants? Well, they come from Molluscs. Molluscs are invertebrates that include squid, octopuses, cuttlefish, nudibranchs, snails, slugs, limpets, sea hares, mussels, clams, oysters, scallops, and other lesser known creatures.

Molluscs, belong to the phylum Mollusca, a major division of invertebrates with over 100,000 species, second to Arthropods. Their ability to survive is inspiring. They can be found at all latitudes and in both tropical and temperate regions.